Lost Years. A Memoir 1945–1951

However, I freely admit that I am kept awake by a kind of

1 Gerald Heard used to tell how, while he was visiting the Kiskaddens, Bill had noticed a wart on his finger and had told him, “I can cure that right away.” He had then produced several needles and had stuck them into Gerald’s wart. Then he had heated the needles with a match. The pain, Gerald said, was extreme––adding that Bill had watched his face all the time, waiting for him to betray his suffering. But Gerald, being Gerald, didn’t––so Bill was foiled.

Bill must have had much more fun when he cut out Christopher’s pile (see the journal entry of April 24, 1944) because Christopher “yelled clear around the block.”

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obstinacy––just as it is obstinacy which makes him play the

records.

It is only in the last sentence that Christopher hints at the basic hostility between Caskey and himself; the clash of their wills. The standing argument over Caskey’s midnight record playing was simply one expression of this. Caskey’s and Christopher’s wills had always clashed (see pages 52‒53) but the clash was now becoming much more destructive. Now that they had settled into a relatively permanent home, they had no prospect of change or travel to divert them, no move to New York or trip around South America. Neither of them could say to himself, “I’ll put up with this, because it won’t be for long.” Now they had to face the question, “What kind of a life are we going to have together––for the next five, ten, twenty years?”

As far as Christopher was concerned, the answer was, “I want to have a comfortable, predictable, fairly quiet daily life, in which my mind will be as free from anxiety as possible and I shall be able to work. I want sex, of course, with Caskey but I won’t be unreasonably jealous if he runs around with other people––especially if he does it elsewhere, because then I’ll be able to bring my own boys back here and screw them comfortably at home. I don’t care much for parties but I’m prepared to give them from time to time,

especially if Caskey makes all the arrangements and does all the cooking and we don’t have to stay up too late. Oh sure, I’ll help with the dishwashing if necessary. As for Caskey himself, I want him to be happy and busy (at something, never mind what) and to go to bed and wake up at the same time I do.”

Caskey didn’t see things in this way, at all. He didn’t want his life to be predictable. He wanted surprises, unexpected guests, parties which snowballed into roaring crowds, out-of-town trips taken on the spur of the moment. He would tidy the house one day and

drunkenly wreck it the next. He was ready to work for hours on any project which interested him, but he hated the concept of work for work’s sake and he couldn’t understand Christopher’s compulsive need to be busy. He may well have begun to feel, already, that by coming back to live with Christopher in California he had walked into a trap.

Christopher’s reasonableness, the justice of his case, the modera-tion of his demands upon Caskey were a bit too convincing––and he knew it. Relations between two human beings who are supposed to love each other––and perhaps actually do, from time to time––

cannot be regulated by a code of rules. The truth is that Christopher was no more reasonable than Caskey; he merely had a knack of

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maneuvering himself into positions in which he was, technically, “in the right”––whereupon Caskey, with his passive obstinacy, would not only accept the counterposition of being “in the wrong” but would proceed to make the wrong as wrong as he possibly could. He always behaved worst when there was no conceivable excuse for his behavior. That was his kind of integrity.

Maybe Caskey never quite realized the dimensions of

Christopher’s arrogance––for Christopher was usually careful not to reveal them. In his inmost heart, Christopher thought of himself as an art aristocrat or brahmin, a person privileged by his talent to demand the service (he preferred to call it “the cooperation”) of others. In his youth, he had felt this even more strongly, and had often told Nanny, when she grumbled about the housework, that she ought to feel proud that she was helping him finish his novel––by taking domestic chores off his hands. (In the Soviet Union, he added, this principle was recognized––so that only artists and other leading brainworkers had servants.) Once, in an outburst of frankness, he had confided to the Beesleys––who thoroughly approved of his attitude––“What I really want is to be waited on hand and foot.”

Vernon Old (of all people!) in the innocence of his early enthusiasm for Christopher, had read Goodbye to Berlin and exclaimed, “It makes me feel I ought to drop everything and cook for you and look after you––so you can go on writing!” (This declaration brought tears to Christopher’s eyes. It still touches me––even though I now know that Vernon was describing the attitude which he would later

expect his various girfriends and wives to take toward himself. . . .

Incidentally, the journal entry of March 3 mentions that Christopher has heard “Vernon isn’t getting along at all well with Patty.”) Since his return to California, Christopher had reestablished relations with the Vedanta Center but he only went there when he felt that he absolutely had to. His guilt feelings were very strong. He hated having them and he was inclined to blame Caskey for them.

He was aware that both Huxley and Heard had made remarks about his way of life which had reached Swami’s ears, directly or indirectly.

(This was bitchy of Gerald and Aldous, to put it mildly, for neither of them had disdained to accept Christopher’s and Caskey’s hospitality.) Swami had so far said very little about this to Christopher, but Christopher felt that Swami regarded Caskey as a bad influence and that Caskey knew this and defiantly enjoyed the situation. The two seldom met and made no contact when they did. If Caskey had

been a professed or prospective Vedantist, much would have been forgiven him––but Caskey was clearly unconvertible. A lot of

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was ashamed of his drunkenness and sex but he hated having Swami know about it. He would have preferred to lead a double life with a clear-cut division between the two halves, but he couldn’t, and Caskey was the reason why he couldn’t. Just because Caskey was so socially presentable––up to a point––and could mingle with the Huxleys, the Kiskaddens and the rest of Christopher’s respectable friends––Christopher found that his life had become all of a piece; everybody knew everything there was to know about him. In

theory, he saw that this was morally preferable; it made hypocrisy and concealment impossible. In practice, he hated it.

Caskey never suffered from embarrassment. He didn’t give a damn what anybody knew about him. He would take pains to be polite and agreeable, but he was always capable, in any company, of turning loud and nasty. As for his guilt, it was the inspiration of his religious feelings. He had the black Catholic belief that it is only when you feel guilty that you are in a state of grace. He couldn’t imagine an approach to God other than as a penitent. So it was continually necessary to do or be something he could be penitent for.

Christopher and Caskey still had poignant moments of tenderness, when their guilt became mutual. For a little while they would be drawn together by realizing how unkind they had been to each

other. Then their eyes would fill with tears. Both of them asked for forgiveness and were forgiven; yet forgiveness in itself seemed of secondary importance. They clung together with a feeling that they were two helpless victims of some external power––a power which forced them to be enemies. Caskey enjoyed these moments of

reconciliation much more than Christopher did, I suspect. Caskey’s Catholic mind and Irish heart revelled in suffering for its own sake, equating love with pain. Christopher, cooler hearted and more practical, was impatient of suffering––was shocked at himself for liking it even a little; he accused himself of masochism. He wanted to tune their whole relationship up, remove all causes of friction and get it running smoothly.

When clashing with Caskey, Christopher often thought of himself as The Foolish Virgin (Verlaine) and of Caskey as The Infernal Bridegroom (Rimbaud) in Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. But this was self-flattery. Neither Christopher nor Caskey was wicked enough or desperate enough or daring enough to create an authentic Hell around himself. Their guilt and their suffering was miserably half-assed. Which is why––leaving aside all question of talent––it was eventually commemorated by a miserably half-assed novel, The

World in the Evening.

No––I won’t accuse Caskey. What do I really know about his

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deeper feelings? When I call Christopher half-assed, I know exactly what I mean. He had, so to speak, too many dishes on the stove and not one of them was being properly cooked. He made japam, when he remembered to. He went to see Swami, but only out of duty. He worked on the Patanjali translation, but only to placate Swami. He visited paraplegic patients at Birmingham Hospital (this began later in the year) so that he could picture himself as being engaged in social service. He wrote The Condor and the Cows compulsively and without enjoyment, claiming that he was doing it to promote Caskey’s career as a photographer––and thereby making Caskey responsible for

Christopher’s forced descent into journalism.

What a martyr he felt himself to be! How put upon! He saw

himself as a toiler, Caskey as a lounger––yet Caskey worked just as hard as Christopher when he had something to work on; it was

simply that Caskey had the natural gift of being able to relax in his work and Christopher hadn’t. Did Christopher ever relax? Yes––in the ocean, plunging his hangover headaches into the waves––

drinking, especially if Caskey wasn’t around––naked in bed with Jim Charlton or some other sex mate––but such respites were short.

Most of the time, Christopher was under tremendous strain. In the March 2 journal entry, he writes that he keeps bleeding from the rectum and thinks that this may be a strain symptom. Two months later, he believes that he may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown (May 22).

Now I must mention a feature of life at 333 East Rustic Road which seems to me to have been somehow interrelated with Christopher’s psychological condition––the unpleasant psychic atmosphere in the house. I have no way of fixing a date on which this first became apparent to Christopher and Caskey. I can only remember some

incidents and impressions––

Quite soon after they moved into 333, Christopher talked to Paula Strasberg (on the phone, I think). In the course of their conversation, she said, “It’s a very lonely house.” At the time, her choice of adjective seemed merely odd to him––how could 333 be described as lonely, when the next-door house on one side nearly touched it and when there was a continuous line of houses facing it from across the road? However, by the time he next talked to Mrs. Strasberg, eight months later, he thought he understood what she had meant.

He said to her: “When you told me that this house is lonely, were you trying to warn me that it’s haunted?” Mrs. Strasberg denied this emphatically, she laughed aloud at the very idea. But Christopher wasn’t impressed. He told himself that this old Jewess would naturally 184

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refuse to admit to a ghost, since it was one of those disadvantages which lower property values. Then why had she let drop that word

“lonely”? It must have been a slip––perhaps she had been badly scared at 333, and the impression had remained so strong that she had referred to it in spite of herself. Christopher never found out the truth about this. And now Mrs. Strasberg is dead.

Chris Wood, always a highly credible witness, told how he

decided to drop in on Christopher and Caskey, one morning,

unannounced. When you crossed the bridge over the creek, the

house was on your right. Downstairs were the living room and the kitchen, upstairs were a bathroom and two bedrooms. One of these bedrooms opened onto a glassed-in porch which Christopher used as a workroom. Chris Wood crossed the bridge and approached

the house. As he did so, he saw a figure upstairs moving behind the windows of this porch. Taking it for granted that this was Christopher, Chris went to the front door and knocked. No answer.

Chris then opened the front door and entered. No one in the kitchen or living room. Remembering the figure he had seen upstairs, Chris wondered if it could be a burglar. But he nevertheless bravely climbed the staircase and looked in all the rooms. They were empty.

And there was no other exit from the upper floor.

One evening, Caskey, Carlos McClendon and a few others tried

using a Ouija board in the living room of 333.1 At first the board spelled out words like fuck, cunt, shit––probably with a good deal of encouragement from Caskey. Then they began to question it––

“Who are you?” It gave a woman’s name. “Are you dead?” “Yes.”

“How did you die?” “Murdered.” “Who murdered you?” “Myself.”

“Where did you die?” “Here.”

On January 1, 1950, Bill Harris came to stay with Christopher (Caskey was away in the East). Bill slept in the bedroom adjoining the glassed-in porch; Christopher slept in the other bedroom, beyond it.

One night, Bill woke and saw someone he took for Christopher, in the nearly total darkness, come out of Christopher’s bedroom, cross the bedroom Bill was sleeping in and start going down the

staircase––which led directly out of that bedroom to the ground floor.

Lying in bed, you could watch a person go downstairs until his head 1 No, says Carlos McClendon (December 8, 1972), he wasn’t at the Ouija board party, though he does remember Caskey telling him about it. However, Carlos describes an experience he had which was very like Chris Wood’s.

Approaching the house, one day, he looked up at the glassed-in porch and saw a woman. Bill Harris was downstairs––this must have been in January 1950––and Carlos asked him who the woman was. Bill was alone in the house.

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sank below floor level. Just as this was about to happen, the someone who seemed to be Christopher turned and looked at Bill and said, with intense hatred, “You son of a bitch!” Then he disappeared. At first, Bill was merely astonished. “Chris must be terribly mad about something,” he said to himself. Then he reflected that he had never seen Christopher get mad like this before. Then he began to wonder,

“Was that Christopher?” Then he got out of bed, went across to Christopher’s bedroom and looked in, to find Christopher in bed, snoring peacefully. Then Bill was scared. Nevertheless, with a considerateness which was typical of him, he didn’t wake Christopher.

In themselves, these happenings made no great impression on

Christopher. He didn’t have to be convinced by any more evidence that “hauntings” (whatever they essentially are) do occur. What did impress him was the intensity of the unpleasant psychic atmosphere at 333. Ever since his boyhood at Marple Hall, Christopher had taken it for granted that one’s awareness of such an atmosphere is just as valid as one’s awareness of a strong unpleasant smell. He believed that he himself was particularly sensitive to it,1 and he was rather proud of 1 For example, on May 19, 1948, while Christopher and Caskey were up at Wyberslegh, staying with Kathleen and Richard, they visited Lyme Hall and went round the house on a conducted tour. They managed to keep ahead of the main body of sightseers and thus got an independent first impression of each room before they were caught up with by the others. When Christopher and Caskey went into one of the rooms, Christopher exclaimed at once that it had a horrible atmosphere and must surely be haunted. A few moments later, the guide arrived with the rest of the party and announced that this was The Haunted Room. (Of course it’s quite possible that Christopher had been told about this room when he came to Lyme as a boy.)

But this reminds me of a far stranger experience which, for some reason I failed to record in the 1939–1944 journal. It must have happened sometime in 1939 or 1940, during one of the trips that Christopher and Vernon Old took up into northern California––I am sure Vernon was with Christopher at the time, though he wasn’t involved in the experience.

They were in their car, driving through the Sequoia forest. It was late afternoon, always a time which Christopher found rather sinister in the big woods––the feeling that night is about to fall seemed to him far more menacing than night itself. Suddenly, the road led them around the edge of a large clearing––a cup-shaped hollow which was grassy and swampy. In the middle of this clearing stood a shack. It was a store, and it looked like the stores of pioneer days; maybe it had survived from the period before Sequoia became a national park and private dwellings were forbidden. Anyhow, there it was––and Christopher was happy as well as surprised to see it. He wanted to buy some cigarettes and had despaired of being able to until they were out of this area.

Vernon stopped the car and sat at the wheel waiting while Christopher ran down into the hollow and entered the store. He found the store empty. It 186

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this. However, his experience at 333 was different from any of his others, not only in intensity but in kind.

This atmosphere made itself more strongly felt on the upper floor and particularly in the front bedroom around the top of the staircase, but Christopher was aware of it everywhere. The smallness of the house seemed to compress it and thus add to its power. 333 was dark in the daytime, because of the neighboring hillside and the over-hanging sycamore trees; at night, a guest who saw it brightly lit and full of people would often describe it as snug. But it never seemed snug to Christopher. It seemed secret, unhomely, unheimlich.[*]

Often, when he was working in the glassed-in porch (where there was at least plenty of daylight) he would feel, almost catch a glimpse of, someone at his elbow and turn quickly, but never quickly enough to confront the shadowy presence. At night, when Caskey was out and he was alone in the house, he would sometimes wake thrilling with fear. For a few moments after waking, he would be afraid but not panic stricken. His very belief in the objective existence of the phenomenon reassured him––for him, it wasn’t The Unknown. It

was a manifestation of the psychic world, and the psychic is

always subject to the spiritual. Christopher was a devotee (despite all his backslidings) of Ramakrishna. So how could any psychic phenomenon possibly do him harm?

However, Christopher’s experiences in this house did differ from all the others he had had elsewhere, because they had a second aspect or dimension––so it seemed to him. The longer he lived there, the more wasn’t dark inside and it looked quite as he had expected it would look––

stocked with all the usual goods. After Christopher had waited a short while, a man came out of a room at the back. He asked, “What can I do for you?”

Whereupon, Christopher ran out of the store, dashed up the slope to the car and jumped in, gasping to Vernon to drive away quick.

Even at the time, Christopher found it impossible to explain his panic.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. It has never happened to him since. His impression was that his panic had nothing to do with the atmosphere of the place; it was caused by the man himself. Trying to give Vernon some idea of how he had felt, Christopher said that it was as if that man had been in the midst of doing something unspeakably evil in the back room when Christopher’s arrival had interrupted him. Part of the horror was that he was able to come straight from that unspeakable act and ask a customer, “What can I do for you?” in a quiet ordinary voice. Christopher was certain that he hadn’t been frightened by the man’s appearance; indeed he couldn’t remember anything definite about it. So the man must have somehow projected the terror which Christopher felt. Either that, or the man himself was only a projection of an evil ambience in the store––that is to say, not a man at all.

[* I.e., not snug, not comfortable.]

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he felt that its psychic atmosphere was both something which had belonged to the place before he came there and something which was a projection of his own disturbed, miserable, hate-filled state of mind.

On February 24, Christopher finished chapter nine of The Condor and the Cows, and on March 15 chapter ten.

On March 12, Glenway Wescott arrived and spent a week in the

Canyon. He didn’t stay at 333 but at a motel on Entrada Drive, perhaps because he wanted privacy to work. However, he was with Caskey and Christopher most evenings. He was wonderfully cheerful, silly and energetic, and brightened everybody up. He cooked meals for Caskey and Christopher, read Christopher’s 1939–1944

journals and praised them to the skies, and went to bed with Jim Charlton. He left in a glow of popularity.

On March 22, there was a sneak preview of The Great Sinner at the Criterion Theater in Santa Monica. Christopher had long since given up trying to convince himself that the film was any good. Peck was awful. He did his best but he was hopelessly miscast. In the big emotional scenes he made an ass of himself. Ava Gardner looked beautiful but she was as completely un-Russian as Peck, her voice was ugly and her acting was awkward––they were an uninspiring pair. Walter Huston, as her father, made every scene come to life in which he appeared; but his part was far too small. Ethel Barrymore was excellent in her two gambling scenes. Melvyn Douglas behaved with charm and discretion as Armand de Glasse, the unconvincing character who runs the casino. And the total effect was mediocre, Hollywoodish, saccharine. The preview cards were lukewarm.

Gregory Peck took his failure deeply to heart; it must have hurt his vanity. As a result of this, he developed a distaste for Christopher––

having decided, I suppose, that Christopher’s script was responsible for his humiliation. Although they had gotten along well during the shooting,1 Peck henceforth avoided talking to Christopher when 1 Christopher’s relations with Ava Gardner, Walter Huston, Melvyn Douglas and Robert Siodmak had been good, too––partly because they were all left-wing liberals. He would have liked to know Gardner better––but that would have meant taking her out in the evenings, and Christopher always avoided tête-à-têtes with beautiful well-known women––either they thought you were making a pass or suspected you of only seeing them because you yourself were trying to pass. (Incidentally, one of the camera crew remarked about Ava to Christopher––“You wouldn’t believe it, but I hear she stays home most evenings, longing for the phone to ring. Seems like she’s one of the gals that guys never try to date, because they’re sure she’s all booked up.”) Robert Siodmak was the friendliest of them all. Several people told 188

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they met at parties. It wasn’t until years later that he became gracious again––and even helped Christopher become a member of the

Academy.

Fodor may well have been partly responsible for Peck’s attitude.

As soon as it became evident that The Great Sinner had laid an egg, Fodor started a subtle propaganda campaign to convince all who were concerned that it was Christopher who had spoilt the script by his revisions. I’m sure Fodor didn’t convince Gottfried Reinhardt, and I doubt if Fodor managed to do Christopher any serious harm professionally, but the ill will must be taken for the deed.

On March 26, Christopher went with Tito Renaldo to see Swami.

I don’t know if this was the day that Tito first met Swami––it may have been much earlier. But I think that Tito probably asked Swami on this occasion if he could go and live at Trabuco as a monk, as soon as it was opened as a monastery. Gerald Heard had already talked the trustees into handing over the property to the Vedanta Society.

Trabuco opened officially on September 7, 1949.

On April 2, Christopher finished writing The Condor and the Cows.1

On the 4th, he and Caskey mailed the manuscript and the photographs––two copies of each––to Methuen and to Random House.

Caskey had worked really hard on the photographs, developing, enlarging and cropping them himself and making a dummy of the illustration pages which showed the exact relative sizes for each picture to be printed. He had also designed a photographic montage for the jacket––the two ceramic bulls they had brought back from Pucará in Peru superimposed on a view of the marble column topped by a carved condor (in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela) which commemorates the foreigners who came to South America to fight for Bolívar. And he had done a pen-and-ink drawing of Cuzco as a

frontispiece for the book.

On April 5, David Kidd (one of Christopher’s [friends]) brought Sara Allgood to the house. Christopher had the advantage of being one of the few people in Los Angeles who had seen her in the

Christopher that Siodmak was queer. Christopher never saw any definite evidence of this, but he did sometimes wonder if Siodmak fancied him.

1 Although Christopher had complained so much about the boredom of this project, he began to enjoy himself while working on the final chapter and was later rather proud of the purple passage with which it closes––particularly:

“. . . Atahuallpa baptized and strangled, Alfaro torn to pieces, Valencia translating Wilde above a courtyard of violets––” The rhythm of this seemed to him extraordinarily exciting and he made excuses for quoting it to his friends––in a tone of humorous apology for its melodrama. But no one ever protested that it was beautiful.

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original London production of Juno and the Paycock. So he was able to delight her by saying (ninety percent sincerely) that her “Sacred Heart o’ Jesus” speech was one of his favorite theatrical memories.

She loved his flattery, and the little onions which Caskey kept for the martinis––indeed, she ate nearly a whole jar of them. Christopher loved her ladylike airs and her wonderful rich voice––indeed, he found himself talking to her with a slight Irish accent. Their meeting was a huge success and was repeated.

On April 6, Caskey photographed Thomas Mann––this was one

of his best sets of portraits.

On April 7, Christopher sent a reply to an invitation to take part in a conference for world peace which was being held in Los Angeles under the auspices of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. He refused to attend, on the grounds that this wasn’t a genuine peace conference but a political demonstration with a pro-Russian slant. Christopher’s letter is very well constructed, it makes telling points and its main accusation is really unanswerable.1 (Before 1 Some extracts from Christopher’s letter:

Strict pacifism is total and neutral. . . . You do not pretend to be total pacifists, and I’m not going to try to convert you to that position. What I am now concerned with is your neutrality. . . . I am . . . basing my opinion

. . . on your own leaflet, your “call” to the conference . . . a whole paragraph is devoted to Washington’s misdeeds and mistakes. I agree with much of what is said. . . . But where is the paragraph which ought, in fairness, to follow it . . . dealing with the misdeeds and mistakes of Moscow? You imply or seem to me to imply––that the “cold war”. . . must be blamed entirely on the U.S. government. This is simply not true. . . . If we invite guests from overseas, we should not greet them with accusations. We should be humble and dwell most upon our own shortcomings. I take this to be your intention. Nevertheless, I must suggest that such politeness hopelessly confuses the issue . . . by refraining from criticism of Soviet militarism and aggression, you imply that your guests are associated with it and that, therefore, you mustn’t hurt their feelings. Isn’t this . . . an accusation? A well-founded accusation, I fear. Consider the facts. The greatest police state on earth permits some of its prominent citizens to come over to this country and take part in a peace conference. Such a conference . . . ought to imply a condemnation of all the governments whose nationals are involved[,] since these governments have failed to establish peace. . . . If these Russian delegates had come with genuinely neutral, pacifistic aims, they would be condemning Soviet militarism. Their lives would be in danger. They could never return to their own country. . . . I am forced to believe that the Russian delegates were permitted to come . . . because the Soviet government intends to exploit . . . your whole conference for propaganda purposes. . . . I fear that its findings and resolutions . . . will inspire militarists within the Soviet Union with the most dangerous confidence that the 190

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sending off his letter, he had gotten in touch with the local Quakers and found that they entirely agreed with his stand.) What makes me a bit uncomfortable, rereading it today, is to remember that it was written in the midst of the McCarthy era. The senator and his committee were attacking these people for holding the peace conference, and what they were saying against it was more or less what Christopher was saying––that it was red. Christopher loathed the Soviet government for disowning the attitude toward the private life prescribed by Marx, and for persecuting its homosexuals. He somewhat disliked the Jewish parlor-communist intellectuals who were members of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. But he also loathed McCarthy and the red-hunters––and it is humiliating to reflect that they might have approved of his letter or at least decided that it showed he was rather more on their side than the other. (Christopher was certainly more a socialist than he was a fascist, and more a pacifist than he was a socialist. But he was a queer first and foremost. I remember a discussion he had with Caskey and some others around that time on the question: “If you could produce positive proof that McCarthy is queer––would you use it to ruin his political career?” Their unanimous verdict was, “No––because all queers would be harmed if it became known that he was one.”

On April 8, Christopher and Caskey had a birthday party for Jim Charlton. And Christopher restarted The School of Tragedy for the third time, after an interval of twenty-two months. This opening is perhaps the most promising one he ever made. Stephen is writing a letter––or maybe a journal in letter form––addressed to someone called Edward. I have no idea, now, if Edward was to have been a major or a minor character; but the tone of voice of this extract suggests the literary tone of Edward Upward, and Stephen seems to be much livelier, more amusing, less sentimental and self-pitying than the character he will later become.1

intelligentsia of the United States are actually on their side; that the cold war

. . . should therefore be pressed to the uttermost. . . . Such confidence . . .

might well lead to the outbreak of armed hostilities. . . .

1 Christopher made another start on May 2––this, like the first three, was set in the refugee hostel. On May 9, he tried again––beginning, this time, with the flight east from Los Angeles following Stephen’s breakup with Jane (Anne, as she was then called). This may have been another false start––it is certainly very bad; it reads like inferior Scott Fitzgerald––or it may have been revised and then added to later; for the day-to-day diary entry of June 27 records that Christopher finished chapter one of The School of Tragedy on that day. I dare say the manuscript of this chapter is stored away somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to look for it now.

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On April 11, Christopher worked at MGM on what the day-to-

day diary describes as “retake changes.” I can’t remember what these were.

On April 19, Christopher saw Dodie and Alec Beesley, who had

recently moved into a house on Cove Way, behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, just off Benedict Canyon. This was to be the last of their Californian homes.

On April 29, he drove with Swami to Trabuco, for the day. This probably means that some monks from the Hollywood Vedanta

Center were already living there, cleaning the place up and getting it ready for its official opening.

On May 3, the day-to-day diary notes that Rita was “released.” I think this refers to Rita Cowan’s release from prison––for I dimly remember that her husband or boyfriend, a black man, was shot dead by the police and that Rita regarded this as a murder and made some kind of [. . .] protest scene which ended with her being locked up.

On May 20, Christopher had another contact with the National

Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. The writer Paul Jarrico had previously written him about the blacklisting of Albert Maltz, who was under prosecution by the U.S. government for refusing to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities. As a result, Twentieth Century-Fox had decided not to produce a film based on Maltz’s novel The Journey of Simon McKeever. Jarrico had asked Christopher to write a letter in support of Maltz which could be read aloud at a meeting of the film division of the council on May 25.

Christopher wrote and sent them a letter––he couldn’t do otherwise.1 But, as before, his anti-Soviet sentiments showed between the lines. Also, his resentment at having been made to read Maltz’s boring and insipid novel––why did the vast majority of these literary martyrs have to be without talent?

On May 21, Klaus Mann killed himself in Cannes. I can’t

May 20.

1Dear Mr. Jarrico,

Thank you for your letter about Albert Maltz [one of the Hollywood Ten].

I’m sorry that I can’t be with you on the platform on May 25 when you hold your meeting, but I shall certainly be there in spirit. I loathe all censorship––no matter whether it comes from the Right or the Left. Luckily, as a rule, it defeats its own object.

As for The Journey of Simon McKeever, it seems to me a charming novel, which couldn’t hurt a baby, politically or otherwise. If anyone could possibly object to it, I should have expected the communists to do so. Isn’t it what they call “liberal romanticism”?

With best wishes for the end of this, and all other witch-hunts, Sincerely. . . .

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remember how soon Christopher got the news; probably almost at once, because of being in touch with the Mann family. I do

remember that Christopher had to tell Harold Fairbanks, and that Harold was obviously much more upset than he would admit.

The day-to-day diary records that Christopher finished writing, on that day, a foreword to Luise Rinser’s novel Die Stärkeren. I think he did this for an English translation of the book which Bill Kennedy was trying to get published in the States––as far as I know, it never actually was. Although Christopher did the job for money, he really liked the book, partly because it made him feel nostalgic. He very seldom read anything in German, and the language itself brought back unexpected memories.

On May 22, there is another isolated entry in the 1948–1956

journal. And in it, for the first time, Christopher discusses the possibility of leaving Caskey. This possibility he rejects because (1) there is no one else to go to and (2) he isn’t prepared to return to live at the Vedanta Center. In other words, Christopher is definitely not prepared to face the prospect of living alone.

After writing this, Christopher makes resolutions:

. . . staying together means accepting Caskey exactly as he is. I must remember this. I must renounce all attempts to change Caskey’s attitude, behavior or habits. I must accept him, and thereby

renounce my whole possessive attitude towards him.

This does not mean that I shouldn’t give my honest opinion and advice––if asked.

And it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t insist on a few simple

rules––like the business of making a noise at night. That’s all right, because it’s no more than anybody would ask, even in the most casually polite relationship.

I must stop trying to subdue Caskey, to shame him, to make him feel guilty.

Oh dear––is this possible?

It is not possible if it’s done as an act. It is not possible if you are all the time watching to see the effect of your new technique on Caskey. It is possible if you build up your inner life of prayer, meditation, artistic creation, physical exercise and routine, and simply let Caskey do as he pleases––always welcoming any

advance on his part.

Well––go ahead. You have plenty of work: your novel, the

story with Samuels. Take it easy. Don’t get tense.

There is one sentence which exposes the futility of Christopher’s resolutions: “It is not possible if it’s done as an act.” But how else ¾ 1949 ¾

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could it possibly have been done? Relations between Caskey and Christopher could only have been improved if one of them had

made an unconditional surrender, and left it up to the other to be as generous or ungenerous as he chose. But Christopher didn’t dream of surrendering. He was merely proposing to adopt a strategy, and a strategy must necessarily be some kind of an act; it can never produce behavior which is spontaneous.

Christopher and Caskey still loved each other, up to a point––but not nearly enough to make their relationship work. In this May 22

entry, Christopher compares the state of affairs between them to “the mood of 1940, in which I was bubbling with resentment against Vernon.” This calls attention to a weakness which Christopher showed on both occasions––he found it almost impossible to break off a relationship even when it was making him miserable. It was Vernon who finally had to leave Christopher (on February 17, 1941), though it was Christopher who had prodded him into doing so. And it was Caskey who finally had to force Christopher to leave him; Christopher always hesitated to take the decisive step. He was to go on hesitating for two more years.

How about Caskey? Was he miserable too, at this time? He

certainly didn’t seem so, to Christopher. But then I am only now beginning to realize how little Christopher knew––bothered to know––about Caskey. Caskey wore a mask of frivolity, camping and wisecracking, which Christopher never saw behind. Their occasional drunken scenes of emotional contrition and forgiveness actually revealed nothing. Christopher never got a glimpse into Caskey’s reverie or his fantasies. I don’t believe he ever tried to find out what Caskey was thinking about, what kind of myths he was celebrating, as he drank and danced for hours, alone, in the dead of night, to his favorite records.

I now believe that Caskey was suffering––but in a way that was only indirectly related to Christopher. He was suffering from guilt because he didn’t love his father and sisters and was maddened by his mother, because he had broken with their religion, because he found it a terrible strain to play the unrepentant queer black sheep of the family. All that Christopher offered him was another sort of family life, which didn’t work. Caskey was being forced to face the fact that the only security for him was in complete independence.

Christopher would never help Caskey achieve this, for Christopher himself was afraid of being alone. Lennie Newman and Caskey’s other playmates would never help him, even if they could, for they wanted him to keep on playing his role of the madcap hostess, and for that Christopher’s money––and therefore his presence––was 194

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necessary. So, sooner or later, Caskey would have to take the initiative and make his own move. In the meantime, Christopher sulked and Caskey danced.[*]

On May 29, 1949, Catherine Caskey arrived, to begin a visit which was to last into the middle of August. The day-to-day diary entries make it seem clear that she didn’t sleep at 333 East Rustic, even to start with. But she had a room somewhere nearby, and Caskey and Christopher felt a constant obligation to entertain her.

Christopher could afford not to mind this, because Catherine had no power to embarrass him, and because Caskey resented Catherine’s presence so violently that Christopher was obliged to play the opposite role and be her advocate. It was Christopher who suggested that the U.S. edition of The Condor and the Cows should be dedicated to Catherine; the British edition was being dedicated to Kathleen.

This put Catherine and Kathleen into a relationship with each other, of which Catherine was coyly aware. They were an unsanctified pair of mothers-in-law. The dedication delighted Catherine. It gave her a share in this South American project which had launched Caskey as a photographer––a thoroughly respectable career, of which the whole Caskey family could approve. Whether any of them can

possibly have approved of the Caskey–Christopher relationship is more than doubtful, but Catherine was determined to pretend that they did. She even quoted a male relative as having said, “It was a lucky day for Sonny when he met Christopher Isherwood.”

(“Sonny” was a family nickname for Caskey which Catherine persisted in using; it made Caskey wince and grind his teeth.)

On May 30, Christopher had a visit from a young Canadian

named Paul Almond. I suppose he was an admirer of Christopher’s work. Paul was blond and apple cheeked and tall, an all-Canadian boy who played championship ice hockey and belonged to a rich family. He returned to the house three or more times during June, and was exposed to the camping of Caskey and the double-meaning jokes of Stephen Spender (who came to stay two nights, June 14 and 15, bringing with him the young writer Bill Goyen, on whom he had a crush, and Goyen’s friend Walter Berns). But Paul was either very innocent or very self-absorbed; he saw only what he had come to see, a nice middle-aged celebrity and his charming friends. Later that same year, Paul went over to England, taking with him a letter of introduction from Christopher to John Lehmann. John, on the make for Paul, started dropping arch hints about Christopher’s way of

[* Here Isherwood came to the end of his manuscript book and began a new one.]

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life––as Christopher had fully expected that he would. Paul was incredulous and indignant. He wrote to warn Christopher that John Lehmann was a false friend who was spreading horrible lies, accusing Christopher and his companions of being “homosexualists.”

(Many years later, Paul married the actress Geneviève Bujold and directed her in a film, Act of the Heart. They are now divorced.) On June 1, Christopher bought a Tarascan statuette, dug up in the Mexican state of Colima; a seated figure with its right hand covering its mouth. Christopher paid Stendahl’s (an expensive dealer who sold a lot of pre-Columbian art to Charles Laughton) about eighty dollars for it; it would probably now cost at least a thousand. The statuette was a present for Caskey, on his twenty-eighth birthday, next day.

But Christopher ended by owning it, when he and Caskey split up and divided their possessions, a few years later.

On June 11, Christopher and Caskey, the old actress Aileen

Pringle, Jay Laval, a friend named Leif Argo, Catherine Caskey and Jo and Ben Masselink all drove down to have supper at Charpentier’s in Redondo Beach. (This is the first time that the day-to-day diary mentions a meeting with the Masselinks but they, Christopher and Caskey had become acquainted long before this, probably at The Friendship bar.) Charpentier was a famous old French chef whose reputation was such that he cooked suppers by appointment only and always had a long waiting list. He lived in a small ordinary house on the Pacific Coast Highway and the room where you ate was just a typical, rather depressing parlor. Charpentier received you with a fulsome spiel about the cuisine of la belle France. You had to bring your own wine. The food was no doubt excellent––Jay thought it was––but Christopher never got to taste it. He was drunk already when they arrived, and went to sleep in a hammock on the front lawn. They woke him when it was time to leave.

There is very little to be said about the rest of June. The day-to-day diary records three parties given by Frank and Nan Taylor––one for Stephen Spender (on another of his visits), one for Robert Penn Warren, and one which included Penn Warren, Chaplin and Edgar Snow. I can remember nothing of interest about Warren, except that Christopher and Caskey both liked him a good deal and that Caskey photographed him. I can remember nothing at all about the meeting with Snow––whom, I suppose, Christopher hadn’t seen since the late thirties. Christopher’s chief occupations during this period: working with Lesser Samuels on their new film story, The Easiest Thing in the World; drinking; lying on the beach. Christopher must also have been working on his novel occasionally, for he records that he finished chapter one on June 27. He still called it The School of Tragedy.

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On July 5, the proofs of the U.S. edition of The Condor and the Cows arrived from Random House. The proofs of the British edition arrived from Methuen’s on July 12.

On July 6, the day-to-day diary mentions Jim Charlton’s mother.

She was then staying with Jim in Santa Monica and Jim took

Christopher to visit her. I can’t remember what she looked like. Jim thought her half crazy and an obsessive hypochondriac. Mrs. Charlton was convinced that she had cancer and kept going to doctors for examinations and tests. At that time, the tests always proved to be negative. Nevertheless, she died of cancer, not long after this.

On July 9, Caskey and Christopher set off by car at 7:00 a.m. to visit Carter Lodge at the AJC Ranch. ( John van Druten wasn’t there.) Their car broke down in Redlands, with radiator trouble.

They didn’t get to the ranch until 6:30 that evening. On July 10, Carter’s friend Dick Foote1 came down to see them for the day. On the 11th, Caskey and Christopher returned home.

1 I don’t know when Carter Lodge and Dick Foote first met each other, but I do remember that Carter described their meeting more or less as follows: Carter was waiting somewhere (on a street corner, I think) when a young man walked past him. The young man looked so miserable that Carter found himself saying, “Cheer up!” The young man walked on a little way, as though he hadn’t heard; then he turned and came back to Carter and asked him, “Did you say what I think you said?” Thus they became lovers. Dick had been a complete stranger in town, lonely, jobless and desperate––and Carter’s kindness so overwhelmed him that he fell for Carter then and there.

This sugary story was all the harder to believe because Dick himself seemed so full of baloney. He was an incurably absurd character. Even his powerful body and his nice-looking face had a quality of caricature about them. His big muscles didn’t go with his professed vulnerability and neither did his sentimental dark eyes with his impudence. He was a singer of throbbingly mournful cowboy ballads and a payer of outrageous compliments. He would sidle up to Christopher and mutter: “Jeez, that sexy little ass of yours makes me hot! I’d like to fuck the living shit out of you!” This was his approach to most of the queers and many of the women that he met. He claimed that he had talked like this to Garbo and that she’d loved it. Christopher never knowingly heard Dick utter a sincere word. And yet it was easy to enjoy the silly cheerfulness of his company and even to become fond of him, for he was quite without malice.

Christopher became fond of Dick, and so did the Beesleys, up to a point. Alec described him as looking “like a coal heaver.”

Christopher and Caskey probably met Dick Foote for the first time on February 5, 1949. This is the first mention I can find of Dick in the day-to-day diary. On that day, Christopher drove down to the AJC Ranch to stay with John and Carter, and remained till February 8. The day-to-day diary doesn’t actually name Caskey or say “we drove,” so it’s possible Christopher was alone.

What did John van Druten think of Dick Foote? Most of the time, he ¾ 1949 ¾

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On July 20, Christopher drove up to Santa Barbara by himself, to see Sister (Mrs. Wykoff ) who had been seriously ill with pneumonia and an attack of uremia. She then seemed to be recovering. But she died on the 23rd. On the 26th, Christopher went to the Vedanta Center to attend her funeral. This and his visit to Santa Barbara are described in the 1948–1956 journal. Christopher was much moved by Swami’s description of Sister’s death and his statement that “she was a saint.” Christopher writes that he arrived at the temple in a bad state of mind, because “I’d been horrible and unkind to Caskey before I left the house, because I’m worried about our money and I keep feeling he ought to help us earn some more.” But the effect of the funeral (or rather, the part of the ceremony which was held at the center) and of talking to Swami about Sister, was that he came away

“in a calm happy ‘open’ mood which lasted for several days––and I felt a real horror of my unkindness to Caskey––or of any unkindness to anyone.” (This latter quote is from the journal entry of August 17.) On August 6, Caskey made one of his weekend trips to Laguna

Beach (probably with Lennie Newman). Christopher went to have supper with The Benton Way Group (see page 24 [note]) at the house on Benton Way. Sam From, his friend George [Bill], Charles

Aufderheide, Paul Goodman, Evelyn Hooker (who, in those days, was still Evelyn Caldwell), David Sachs and Alvin Novak were there.

Paul Goodman was the Socrates of the group. (At that time, he had already written The Breakup of Our Camp and many articles and poems.

I don’t think Christopher had a high opinion of his work, however. It wasn’t until fifteen years later that Christopher was greatly impressed by Paul’s novel Making Do.) That night, Goodman, David Sachs and Christopher probably did most of the talking. I think that the nature of homosexual love was discussed at enormous length, and that they quizzed Evelyn on her knowledge of gay slang and kidded her, saying that they were going to smuggle her into a gay male bathhouse.1

probably accepted Dick because he felt he had no right not to, as long as Starcke was around. But Dick certainly got on John’s nerves. As for Carter, he loathed Starcke and used his always powerful influence upon John to undermine Starcke’s position and get rid of him––which he ultimately succeeded in doing.

1 On June 8, 1974, Evelyn Hooker reminded me of an extra detail in this story.

Christopher and the others said that they would smuggle her into the Crystal Baths, a notorious old bathhouse which then stood on the edge of the beach in Ocean Park. This building had several floors and on the top of it was a sun deck for nude sunbathing. Evelyn says that Christopher told her that he could get her onto the ground floor and maybe the second but that she’d undoubtedly be caught if she ventured higher, and that the queers would then put her to death instantly. (A typical specimen of Christopher’s antiwoman fantasies!) 198

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Evelyn had begun her researches into the social structure of the homosexual subculture, and she was an energetic and daring field-worker who had ventured into many rough bars and orgiastic parties.

Sam From had been among the first who volunteered to answer

Evelyn’s exhaustive questionnaires. He and Evelyn had also been to bed together.[*] At the moment, Sam had a slight crush on Christopher. But Christopher wasn’t interested. Besides, he

was dazzled by Alvin Novak, the Alcibiades of that evening’s

Symposium, whom he was meeting for the first time. Alvin was a dark handsome boy. Christopher immediately decided that he

resembled Titian’s painting of the young man with the glove.[†] No doubt he told Alvin this repeatedly. Alvin must have felt flattered, for his eyes gave Christopher encouraging signals. In true Platonic style, the Benton Way Symposium continued until dawn, and then Christopher drove back to Santa Monica with Alvin Novak. Sam

From came along too, perhaps hoping to get into bed with

Christopher. My impression is that Christopher either avoided this altogether or that he played around with Sam until Sam, who

always got very drunk on these occasions, passed out. Anyhow, Christopher ended up making sex with Alvin, and he later looked back upon that night as having been highly romantic. It was

unique, at any rate. Christopher never went to a party that was quite like it.

On August 9, Lesser Samuels and Christopher finished the rough draft of the treatment of The Easiest Thing in the World.1

On August 10, Christopher had lunch with Igor and Vera Stravinsky, Aldous and Maria Huxley and Robert Craft at the Farmer’s Market.

This was Christopher’s first encounter with the Stravinskys and Craft. Craft has described it at length, in Retrospectives and Conclusions.

I myself remember little or nothing about it; my first distinct memories are of our second meeting. Craft uses the surprising adjective “lovelorn” to describe Christopher. Can he have meant that Christopher somehow showed that he was unhappy in his

1 “Everybody loves scandals . . . and witch-hunts . . . and smears. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make us believe evil––of anything––a play, a book, a person, a faith.” This quotation [from the script] sufficiently explains the title.

I can’t bring myself to summarize the story itself. It is one of the least distinguished pieces of film writing in which Christopher was ever involved; a liberalistic, goody-goody drama about the awful effects of slander on the inhabitants of a small town.

[* Near the end of her life, Evelyn Hooker said they had not.]

[† “The Man with the Glove” (c. 1520), in the Louvre.]

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homelife? If so, this doesn’t jibe with Craft’s statement that, “His sense of humor is very ready. He maintains a chronic or semi-permanent smile . . . supplementing it with giggles,” etc. Craft goes on to relate how Christopher told them “a story of why he is no longer invited to [Charlie] Chaplin’s: ‘Someone had said I had peed on the sofa there one night while plastered.’ ” This one detail makes me suspect that this alleged diary entry may in fact have been reconstructed by Craft quite a long while after the event. For Christopher was actually still being invited to the Chaplins’. He went on seeing them for another ten months.1

On August 14, Catherine Caskey finally left––for San Francisco, on her way back to Kentucky. Christopher writes about her on

August 17, in the 1948–1956 journal, saying that Caskey has admitted that “his drinking and neurotic laziness [were] largely due to her being here.” Christopher adds that Catherine is determined to regard Caskey as a model son and that “her obviously excessive (and insincere) praises” make him “frantic with guilt.” (Christopher suspects that Catherine is subconsciously trying to spite her husband by praising her son.)

In this entry, Christopher states that, “All [that] stuff I wrote about leaving him is beside the point. I can’t. I must not. At least not now.

1 As far as I can recall, the accusation that Christopher had passed out at a Chaplin party and then peed, while unconscious, on one of his sofas was reported to Christopher by Iris Tree or Ivan Moffat. Caskey, who was with Christopher that evening, was certain that it was untrue. Iris and Ivan obviously believed that it was true, which hurt and annoyed Christopher a good deal. Personally, I’m pretty sure that Christopher was innocent, simply because he had never done such a thing before and has never done it since. The intoxicated body is apt to have a predictable pattern of behavior. Christopher’s bladder and stomach were both strong; it was no more likely that he would pee involuntarily than that he would throw up––and he never threw up.

Still, the fact remains that Chaplin did stop inviting Christopher. He was reported to have said, “I can’t stand a man who can’t hold his liquor.” Many years later, Christopher tried, through Salka Viertel, to arrange a reconciliation with him. Salka went to Oona Chaplin, who went to her husband; but Charlie was firm––so firm, that Oona told Salka she believed Charlie must have some other, much more serious motive for his refusal. The mystery is still unsolved.

(Talking of making messes in public––or rather, of not making them––

reminds me of a scene which took place sometime in 1951, while Christopher and Caskey were living at Laguna. They had gone to a queer party at the home of an excessively houseproud male couple and Christopher had fallen asleep, drunk, on the floor. One of the hosts saw this and begged Caskey to remove Christopher “before he throws up all over the carpet.” To which Caskey––as Christopher was later told––replied with blazing scorn, “What do you think he is––a queen?”)

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The day may come when I ought to. I don’t know. I certainly don’t want to.”

There are also some “good” resolutions. Christopher counts his blessings and reminds himself that, “Prayer, meditation, thought, creation are the only refuge and stronghold. Without them, I am nothing. Without them, life is really an agony.” (I have no right to sneer at Christopher’s soul searchings, just because they were conducted amidst bottles and boys––but they do embarrass me.) Then Christopher refers to his novel, which he is trying to restart, and to its chief character, whom he calls “Stephen Monkhouse.”

“Stephen Monkhouse has got to be me––not some synthetic Anglo-American. The few circumstances can so easily be imagined––his ex-wife, his Quaker background, etc. But it must be written out of the middle of my consciousness.” These remarks now seem astonishingly naive to me. Didn’t Christopher realize that what he calls “the few circumstances” must of necessity alter everything? How could he write out of the middle of his consciousness about someone who was tall, bisexual and an heir to a fortune? Christopher’s trouble (which he never recognized until it was too late) was that he was trying to create a fiction character with three dimensions and a life of its own and then use it as the observer figure Christopher Isherwood is used in the Berlin stories and elsewhere.

A journal entry on August 18 merely describes a visit to the Down Beat Café on Central Avenue. Christopher was taken there by

Bernie Hamilton and his girlfriend Maxine, on the night of the 17th.

I can’t remember who Bernie was, except that he was black. I can’t remember anything about the evening, except the embarrassment Christopher felt when Bernie took him into an all-black restaurant for supper before they went on to the Down Beat. It seemed to Christopher that he ought not to be annoying these people by his presence, since there were hundreds of restaurants in this same city where their presence would be unwelcome.

On August 19, Christopher went with a screenwriter named

George Bradshaw to visit Birmingham Hospital in the San Fernando Valley. At that time, it was an armed services veterans’ hospital and a lot of its patients were paraplegics and quadriplegics. Bradshaw had started a project; he wanted to get some of the patients interested in writing stories and articles, and to find fellow writers who would give them professional advice. After this visit, Christopher agreed to join Bradshaw’s project.

On August 20, Christopher and Caskey had supper with the

Stravinskys at their house on Wetherly Drive. (It was probably Bob Craft who got Caskey included in the invitation, for he had visited ¾ 1949 ¾

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Rustic Road alone on the 17th and had met Caskey there.)

Stravinsky welcomed Christopher by saying: “Shall we listen to my Mass before we get drunk?”1 By the end of the evening, Christopher was very drunk indeed and utterly enslaved by the Stravinsky charm, by Vera’s quite as much as Igor’s.

Here are Christopher’s earliest impressions of Igor and of Vera, insofar as I can recapture them: His cuddly animal smallness,2 his 1 In the Stravinsky–Craft Dialogues and a Diary, Igor is quoted by Craft as saying: “On Christopher’s first visit to my home, he fell asleep when someone started to play a recording of my music. My affection for him began with that incident.” Igor’s memory (or Bob’s) may be inaccurate here, but I can easily believe that Igor found Christopher sympathetic because (a) he was always ready to get drunk and (b) he offered Igor a friendship which was quite uncomplicated by maestro worship. On the same page of Dialogues and a Diary, Igor is quoted as saying, with reference to Christopher: “We have often been drunk together––as often as once a week, in the early 1950s, I should think.”

This is, to put it mildly, a wild exaggeration, but the note of approval is clear.

Christopher’s appetite for good wine and liquor and food, his lack of pretense about his sex life and indeed also his preference for a devotional form of religion may well have seemed to Igor agreeably “Russian.” Much as he loved and admired Huxley and Heard, Igor must sometimes have found their intellectual power chilling and their Britishness alien. With Christopher, he could be more relaxed. As for Christopher’s deficiency in musical appreciation, Igor was too great a king in his art to feel the lack of one extra courtier.

Christopher actually did like a lot of classical music, including some of Stravinsky’s, but he never told the Stravinskys so––the gross compliments of their courtiers disgusted him. Maybe Igor understood this about Christopher and respected him for it.

2 It was this quality which caused Christopher to begin to think of Igor as belonging to a trio with Prabhavananda and Forster. Both Igor and Swami had an animal smallness which made Christopher want to touch and hug them protectively. Forster was larger and less animal, but he had something in him of the ageless, innocently trustful baby, so it was natural to want to hug him too. Christopher did frequently hug Stravinsky and Forster. His reverence for Prabhavananda as his guru inhibited him, but he was deeply happy when Prabhavananda occasionally hugged him. In most of Christopher’s dreams about Prabhavananda, there were situations of physical (but altogether asexual) closeness––for example, they would be sharing a bedroom in a hotel, or Christopher would be helping Swami dress.

Christopher was never conscious that his familiar behavior toward Stravinsky caused any offense. But Lillian Libman suggests that perhaps it did, to a slight extent. (She was his press representative and personal manager from 1959 onward.) In her book, And Music at the Close, she claims that Christopher’s customary greeting, “Hi, Igor” (according to her, Christopher pronounced it “Eager,” but he didn’t), brought to her ears, and Bob Craft’s,

“an echo of disrespect,” and that “it always startled the composer as much as it did the rest of us.” She adds that Christopher and Don Bachardy (who was of 202

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spontaneous warmth and unembarrassed kisses, his marvellous multi-lingual conversation, his wit (which sometimes seemed wry Jewish, sometimes epigrammatic French, sometimes punning German), his joy in eating and drinking, his Russian-peasant devoutness and superstitiousness, his royal dignity, his aristocratic humility, his accurately and deeply cutting contempt for his enemies, his beautiful modest love for Vera, his acute nervousness.

Her great beauty and her even greater poise. Moving and breathing so easily within the atmosphere of worldly fame, she was Igor’s only imaginable consort. And yet she often seemed as vulnerable as a child. She too loved the best of wine and food, but she didn’t demand that it should be served to her; she was capable of shopping at the market and cooking delicious meals, herself. She also found time to paint pictures and to help run a boutique. She complained constantly of her troubles and problems, always with charming humor. Everything she did and said seemed simple and spontaneous.

She was naturally hospitable and extravagant.

(The word “extravagant” reminds me of a characteristic for which Igor was well known, his avariciousness. Auden, who had had

business dealings with him when writing The Rake’s Progress, complained of it often. Christopher was never exposed to it, which is why it isn’t mentioned in the above list of Christopher’s impressions.

It always appeared to him that Igor accepted and enjoyed the considerable luxury in which they lived. But Vera certainly was extravagant, and maybe this was compensatory role playing, to balance Igor’s penny pinching. As Bob Craft’s influence in the household increased, he came down heavily on the side of extravagance,

encouraging the Stravinskys to spend their money lavishly––not on him but on themselves.)

Bob Craft, when Christopher first met him, was about twenty-

five––he had then been associated with the Stravinskys for less than eighteen months. He appeared to Christopher to be an outstanding specimen of the American disciple type. He obviously adored the Stravinskys and was quick to show off his knowledge of every aspect of The Master’s music. He was pale, boyish, eager, pedantic, cute course merely following Christopher’s example in this) were in a tiny minority; only two or three other people called Stravinsky by his Christian name. These statements by Libman may be mere bitchery. If true they are interesting as a demonstration of two opposed mental attitudes. From Christopher’s point of view, calling Stravinsky “Igor” expressed loving respect, just as continuing to call him “Mr.” or “Sir” or “Maestro” (Christopher never could have used that word except in fun) would have expressed a polite refusal to become more than an acquaintance, and hence a lack of respect and of love.

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[. . .]. Christopher was later flattered to discover that Bob also knew a great deal about his work. Bob even asked a book collector’s technical questions about different editions of The Memorial––

questions which Christopher himself couldn’t answer. He was in fact a whiz kid by nature. Once his mouselike shyness had been overcome, he would get smart-alecky and tactless. On one occasion at least, he went so far as to correct a statement made by Huxley. And he was right!

Craft’s cleverness didn’t annoy Christopher, because they weren’t in competition. Christopher had an entirely different set of pretensions––to intuition, psychological insight, sensibility, etc.––which Bob was prepared to respect. At that period, Bob greatly admired Christopher’s work.1 Christopher felt drawn to Bob and would have liked to become his close friend. But the circumstances of Bob’s life apparently didn’t permit this. In the years to come, they very seldom met each other alone, outside of the Stravinsky household.

Christopher was charmed not only by the Stravinskys themselves but also by their house––or rather, by the atmosphere they had created in it. The Stravinskys had a number of valuable pictures, including several Picassos. Any art gallery or wealthy individual can own such artworks, but Igor’s pictures had their own different kind of value and magic because they were all related to his own life, they were souvenirs of people he had known, not just items in a

collection. Being souvenirs, they didn’t seem out of place amidst the many photographs by which they were surrounded––groups of to-be-famous young faces on the beaches and in the concert halls and restaurants of the nineteen hundreds, the tens, the twenties.

At the end of the house was Igor’s studio, doubly a sacred place, since it contained an icon to which he prayed. One wasn’t forbidden to enter it, but Christopher seldom did more than peep in, respectfully, from its threshold. At the back of the house, steps led up to a small overgrown garden which was often invaded by neighborhood children. Christopher was enraged to think that the wealthy thick-skinned hog neighbors should allow their children to disturb Igor in the midst of his composing––but Igor didn’t seem to mind the noise they made. All he complained of was that they would turn 1 On September 29 of that year, Craft wrote to Christopher from Kingston, New York, where he was staying with his parents. Christopher had just sent him a copy of The Condor and the Cows: “It is radiant, full of love and peace.

There is a new quality in you in these last three years. After three rapid readings it seems to be the best writing I know, whatever.” This suggests something more than literary admiration [. . .].

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on the garden hose and flood the hillside, making mud. He remarked mildly, “They are not always prudent.”

On August 24, Christopher paid his first visit to Birmingham

Hospital alone. He was terribly self-conscious. It seemed tactless and tasteless to have brought his relatively able body into this retreat of the disabled. His self-consciousness was soon cured, however. The day was hot and the hospital passages were very long. By the time he had reached his first patient’s bedside, Christopher heard himself exclaim (to his subsequent huge embarrassment), “My feet are killing me!”

Christopher soon found that he could do what was required of

him easily enough. Some of the patients were indeed interested in writing; others just played along with it out of politeness, because Christopher had taken the trouble to come to see them and because this was the official purpose of his visit. What all of them wanted was to have visitors who would gossip with them about the outside world, and specifically sports and show business. Christopher was no good at the former but better than average at the latter. It was also important that the visitor should be reliably regular, so that his visit could be looked forward to without fear of disappointment.

Christopher wasn’t quite regular, but he did manage to visit

Birmingham Hospital at least once and nearly always three or four times a month from then on until the end of May 1950, when the patients were transferred to a hospital near Long Beach. Sometimes he went alone. Sometimes he took friends with him––either attractive young actresses or people who could talk easily and amusingly.

(Caskey was marvellous at this.)

The paraplegics weren’t sentimental about themselves. Their

humor when speaking to each other was brutal. They said “cripple”

in the tone that blacks say “nigger.” They had no use for the sympathy of able-bodied outsiders, though some of them were probably prepared to exploit it. A visitor was on dangerous ground if he referred to the war. All these men were technically veterans, but that didn’t mean that they had all got their injuries in battle or even that they had seen combat. Those who had been paralyzed as the result of a car wreck in the States or of diving into an empty swimming pool at night while drunk were not charmed if you treated them as heroes or suggested that they had sacrificed themselves to save democracy.

The quadriplegics were, I guess, all hopeless cases; there was nothing they could do to alter their condition. But the paraplegics could do a lot, provided that they persevered––laziness was their deadly sin and living death. Christopher talked to patients who had ¾ 1949 ¾

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been developing their upper bodies doggedly, day by day, for

years––first merely imagining the movement of a finger and sending out commands to it from the brain, again and again and again; then making the finger actually bend; then, months later, achieving a clenched fist; then, after more months, the raising of an arm. They had produced beautifully muscular golden-skinned torsos which Christopher often felt a lust to touch and kiss. They could swing themselves lithely into and out of cars and wheelchairs; cars with specially designed hand controls enabled them to drive around town independently. Sometimes they would even regain their sexual

potency; this had been known to happen when a patient started to go to college and found himself amongst girls who attracted him.

Nevertheless, beneath all this brave activity there lay the squalid basic fact of paralysis. You might move out of the hospital into a home of your own but you couldn’t move very far. You had to go back to the ward for periodical checkups, and you might need to be rushed there if you had a sudden relapse due to some toxic condition which could easily be fatal. And then came periods of depression, when you thought, “Who’s kidding who?” and were apt to drop

your bodybuilding and studying and drink a lot and grow fat and dull. I remember that there was an American Indian boy who

decided that he couldn’t endure this state of medical slavery any longer. His family came for him and took him back with them to their reservation. The doctors at Birmingham warned him that he was probably going to an early death, but he didn’t believe them or didn’t care. I never heard what became of him.

Shortly before Christopher began visiting Birmingham, the paraplegics had been involved in the shooting of a film about themselves.

This was The Men. Its script had been written by Carl Foreman. Fred Zinnemann directed it, Stanley Kramer produced it; its stars were Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright. Quite a lot of the paraplegics appeared as extras in the film and one of them, a beautiful young man named Arthur Jurado, had a speaking part, as “Angel.” The head doctor of the paraplegic section, Dr. Bors, gave Zinnemann technical advice and was represented in the film by a character called “Dr.

Brock,” played by Everett Sloane.

The actors who played paraplegics––Brando, Richard Erdman,

Jack Webb and maybe a few others––all had to learn the techniques of getting into and out of their wheelchairs and of steering and propelling the chairs at racing speed along the hospital corridors.

They also used to visit the bars in their chairs with the genuine patients and pretend to be paraplegics throughout the evening.

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this (to him) slightly indecent playacting. As far as he could tell, they regarded it as merely amusing––with perhaps an underlying pleasure in being, for once, on terms of physical equality with able-bodied young men who were celebrities into the bargain.1

On September 4, Christopher went to a party given by [. . .] a visiting French journalist who had already interviewed him.[*] The party (all boy) was in a shacky old house in the Canyon. After things had got going, a young man danced nearly nude to a record of Ravel’s Boléro. His writhings and yearning gestures seemed ridiculous to Christopher, who rudely laughed. At the end of the dance, the young man announced that he was going into the bathroom and that all were welcome to join him there––“Except that old bag,” he added, with a venomous glance at Christopher. Most of the guests did go into the bathroom, where (presumably) they lined up to fuck the dancer. But the orgy was brief. Something went wrong with the water heater. There was an explosion, followed by yells from the scalded guests and their reappearance in various states of nakedness.

On September 6, Lesser Samuels and Christopher checked a final typescript of The Easiest Thing in the World before handing it over to 1 There was a story about one of Brando’s bar visits which later found its way into gossip columns and became famous. It was certainly true in substance; Christopher heard it from a patient who had been present. Here is, more or less, the patient’s version:

While they were in the bar, a woman came in who was a fanatical evangelist––and maybe drunk, as well. She started haranguing the wheelchair boys, telling them that, if they had faith in the Lord and would pray to Him with her, they could arise out of their chairs and walk. The paraplegics at once realized the comic possibilities of the situation. They waited eagerly to see how Brando would handle it.

Brando began by disagreeing violently with the woman: “That’s a lot of bullshit! I don’t buy that crap!” Then, gradually, he let himself be persuaded

––okay, he still didn’t believe, but she could pray over him if she wanted to.

So the woman started to pray. For a long time, Brando remained absolutely still. Then he began to writhe, twist, strain, groan and try to heave himself out of his chair. He half succeeded, slumped back, tried again, staggered to his feet, seemed about to fall––then suddenly became his normal self, dropped all pretensions, did a short buck and wing routine and ran out of the bar. The woman fainted.

There was another version of the ending to this story––untrue but better: The woman didn’t show the least surprise at Brando’s apparent healing.

Turning to the paraplegics, she said: “What did I tell you, boys? All you need is faith! Come on now, who’s next?”

[* The man was Argentine, not French; he says that he was not a professional journalist and does not recall the interview.]

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be mimeographed. During the next week, copies were sent out to the studios––to be rejected by all of them.

On September 7, Christopher went down to Trabuco for its

official opening as a monastery of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The day-to-day diary says that Christopher drove there with the van Leydens and drove back with Iris Tree and Ford

Rainey. I have no memories of this occasion.

I can skim over the next two months fairly quickly. There are few outstanding events:

Christopher did very little work during this period. Right at the end of it he notes, in the journal, that he has only got as far as page eighteen of his novel. He was steadily but very slowly revising Swami’s commentary on the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali. According to the day-to-day diary entry of September 12, he wrote a foreword on that day to Swami Vividishananda’s A Man of God, which is a life of Swami Shivananda. (Considering the slowness of Christopher’s writing, it’s hard to believe that he finished this job in a single day, even though it only runs to two and a half pages––but maybe Swami was pressuring him.) In the day-to-day diary there are also four references to talks about unspecified movie stories––with Lesser Samuels on October 7 and 24, with Lesser and Aldous Huxley on October 20 and with Aldous on November 3. These were almost certainly just discussions, without anything being put down on paper.1

Meanwhile, Christopher saw quite a lot of people, with or

1 Christopher’s talks with Huxley must have been about the Latin American film story which they later wrote and named Below the Equator. I suppose Christopher called Samuels in as a consultant on this, but he can’t have thought much of their idea for he didn’t collaborate. As for Samuels himself, one of the stories he discussed with Christopher was almost certainly No Way Out. My memory is very weak on this point, but my impression is that the story had been entirely invented by Samuels and already partially written. Nevertheless, Samuels urged Christopher to work on it, saying that he liked having Christopher as a partner. Christopher was discouraged by the failure of The Easiest Thing in the World and altogether in a lazy pessimistic state of mind. So he refused, excusing himself by pointing out that Lesser didn’t need him and could easily finish the story outline alone. Lesser agreed that this was true but he renewed his offer and added that of course he would split fifty-fifty with Christopher in the event of a sale, as before. Again, Christopher refused. Not long after this, No Way Out was finished and promptly sold for a good sum––I believe $75,000 or over. Christopher cursed his stupidity and vowed that, in future, he’d collaborate on any story Lesser proposed. No Way Out was shot and released in 1950, with a screenplay by Lesser Samuels and Joe Mankiewicz, its director. Linda Darnell and Richard Widmark were its leads, but it is chiefly remembered as the film which made Sidney Poitier (like it or not) a star.

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without Caskey. These included Iris Tree and Ford Rainey, the Beesleys, Jim Charlton, Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens, Jay Laval, Jo and Ben Masselink, Gerald Heard, Michael Barrie, the Huxleys, Chris Wood, Salka Viertel, Frank and Nan Taylor, Peggy Kiskadden, John van Druten. In the day-to-day diary, there is no mention of the Stravinskys; they were probably out of town a good deal.

Christopher and Caskey were still having sex together, despite their strained relationship. But Caskey often went out for the night and he spent weekends at Laguna Beach. Christopher would then spend the night with Jim Charlton or with a young man named

Russ Zeininger. Russ had originally been picked up by Caskey, late in August. But Russ didn’t at that time want to be fucked, so Christopher took him over––at first out of mere politeness. Later Christopher became quite fond of Russ, who was a friendly, intelligent person. Their sexual relations weren’t thrilling but were adequate. Russ had an unusually small cock. Christopher was no size queen and this didn’t bother him unduly. Russ has remained a friend to this day––though seldom seen.

Tennessee Williams came to Los Angeles at the end of Sep-

tember, to talk to Irving Rapper and others at Warner Brothers about the forthcoming filming of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee had Frank Merlo with him. Christopher and Caskey saw them on

the 23rd and again on the 25th. Christopher was certainly meeting Frank for the first time. I have an idea that Caskey had met him already, sometime in August or September of 1948, while Caskey was still in the East. Caskey liked Frank from the start, he indeed said that he liked him even better than Tennessee. Christopher also took to Frank at once and soon became deeply fond of him––as nearly all of Tennessee’s friends were. Frank’s racial background was Sicilian.

He was small, lithe, muscular, sexy, with a long pale face and black hair. You could imagine him taking part in a vendetta; he was capable of rage, loyalty to the death, enduring passion. And, at the same time, he was campy, funny, gay, quite as ready to dance as to fight. Frank looked after Tennessee in every way, arranging his travels and his parties, cooking, coping with hustlers, agents and unwelcome callers, giving him shrewd business advice. He was the ideal nanny; the truest friend and lover Tennessee could ever hope to have. Tennessee was well aware of this. He loved Frank dearly, though he often behaved badly to him. They had shattering Latin quarrels which were usually short.

On October 3, an FBI man named Roger Wallace[*] came to talk

[* Not his real name.]

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to Christopher about Agnes Smedley. (FBI men are apt to visit in pairs and I have the impression that Wallace had a colleague with him. If so, his name isn’t mentioned in the day-to-day diary.) Wallace had read Journey to a War and knew of Smedley’s meetings with Auden and Christopher in Hankow, in 1938. He asked if

Christopher could add any details to that account. Christopher could remember none. Then Wallace put a question which seemed to

Christopher so ridiculous that it must be a joke: “Do you think Agnes Smedley is a communist agent?” Christopher retorted: “Do you think Stalin is a communist agent?”––and went on to say that the word “agent” suggests undercover activity; how could it be applied to Smedley, who bombarded the U.S. government every week with public denunciations of its crimes against the people of the communist world? Wallace smiled at this, and the interview was soon concluded in the most friendly manner, without the faintest hint of any accusation against Christopher himself for having associated with a notorious Red. (Christopher thought he could detect, in Wallace’s attitude, the sophisticated contempt of an FBI professional for the crude standards of the McCarthy amateurs––but maybe this was

wishful thinking.) Then why had Wallace taken the trouble to visit Christopher at all? Christopher was inclined to believe that his name had been merely one of many on a list of routine checkups to be made, and that Wallace had chosen him because he lived near the beach and could therefore be used as an excuse for Wallace to spend a couple of extra hours away from the office, sunbathing and

swimming.

On October 10, the day-to-day diary records that Christopher

went with Jay Laval to court––this would have been the West Los Angeles police court––to be present at Caskey’s trial. Since Jay accompanied Christopher and since the 10th was a Monday, I assume that Lennie Newman was also involved and that their arrest was the result of some offense they had drunkenly committed during that weekend. Whatever it was, they didn’t get sent to jail. No doubt they were fined.

Also on the 10th, Christopher went to the Vedanta Center to say goodbye to Swami. He left for India next day, taking three of the nuns with him––Sarada, Barada and Prabha. This was Swami’s

second return visit since his arrival in the States in 1923. His first visit, with Sister, had been in 1935.

On November 8, after a lapse of nearly three months, Christopher made an entry in the journal. After noting that this is his personal Initiation Day––initiation by Swami in 1940, becoming a U.S.

citizen in 1946––he resolves to keep up the journal more regularly, 210

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to write three articles he has promised, to get on with the Patanjali book and with his novel.1 “This summer has been really disgraceful.

I don’t think I can ever remember having been so idle, dull, resentful and unhappy. . . . I feel sick, stupid, middle-aged, impotent. . . . I bore myself beyond tears.”

Christopher also records that, “My life with Bill has reached such a point of emotional bankruptcy that he is leaving, by mutual consent, in a day or two, to hitchhike to Florida to see his sister.”

What Christopher calls “emotional bankruptcy” was actually boredom on Caskey’s side and frustration on Christopher’s. They were weary of being together––though Christopher, as usual, wouldn’t quite admit this and left it to Caskey to make a move. One symptom of their weariness was that they had stopped quarrelling. No doubt most of their friends thought they must be getting along quite well together, and were surprised by Caskey’s sudden departure. In the journal, Christopher comments: “Will this solve anything? It didn’t with Vernon. Well, anyhow, we have to try it.” I don’t think that either of them regarded this as the beginning of a permanent

separation. But maybe Christopher was half-consciously hoping that now they might gradually drift apart, painlessly and without fuss.

Caskey left on November 11. I can’t remember any details of a parting scene; no doubt it all happened very quietly. What I do remember is that that night, after Christopher had returned from a party and gone to bed, he was wakened out of a doze by Jim

Charlton. Jim came bounding up the stairs in the darkness, stripping off his clothes, and jumped naked upon Christopher, panting and laughing. Christopher was amused, sexually aroused and deeply touched––the dog had sensed that his master would be needing him.

Their lovemaking was the perfect prelude to a happy holiday from Christopher’s domestic life.

On November 15 there is a journal entry, complaining of a spell 1 In actual fact, Christopher only managed to make six journal entries during the remaining fifty-three days of that year. Of the three articles he mentions, only one was written at that time; his contribution to the Klaus Mann memorial volume, which he finished on December 1. He did write about Santa Monica Canyon in the article called “California Story,” but not until 1951. (Harper’s Bazaar got it, not Lehmann.) The projected article for Gerald Heard on Vedanta and Christianity was never written. I can’t even remember why Gerald wanted it. The novel continued to give Christopher trouble and he couldn’t make any real progress with it. I suppose he kept the Patanjali book going, at its customary snail crawl, because he had to produce installments of it for the Vedanta magazine.

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of hot weather which is making Christopher lazy, of a sore throat which sometimes almost prevents him from swallowing, and of the cost of entertaining people in restaurants while making “infinitely cautious overtures to prospective affairs.” The only “prospective affair” I can identify was [. . .] a very good-looking young actor, who flirted with Christopher over a considerable period but never put out. Christopher’s complaints about wasting money in restaurants are actually an indirect compliment to Caskey. For Caskey––despite all his wild outings––had remained a strictly economical housekeeper and a fairly regular provider of excellent home-cooked meals.

The next journal entry, November 18, is mostly about Jim

Charlton. Christopher had spent the previous night sleeping at Jim’s apartment, down on the beach near the pier. This was a domestic, not a romantic evening. Christopher, who had just given up

smoking, felt “somewhat dumb and dazed” and his sore throat “was closed, it seemed, to an aperture the size of a pinhole.” After supper (and plenty of drinks, no doubt) both he and Jim dozed off, waking at 3:00 a.m. just long enough to get into bed. In the morning, Christopher felt happy and peaceful. He adds that his thoughts about Caskey are still resentful “––with a kind of wondering horror: how did I ever stand it? The great thing, now, is to relax.”

Here, for the first time, Christopher tries to describe Jim as a character. I have quoted some of the description already (see page 156).1 Its tone suggests that Christopher is still rather in love with Jim––and yet this romantic, sexy, amusing, intelligent and considerate lover–friend evidently isn’t enough for Christopher. He complains that Jim can’t be exclusively loved, because he is a Dog Person and therefore everybody’s property. But the truth is that Christopher found Jim too restful, too easy to be with, too predictable to be all absorbing. Sometimes, by way of a change,

Christopher would deliberately provoke Jim to anger and once or twice Jim even hit him. But there was never any real tension, never any deep jealousy or clash of wills between them. And Christopher’s nature needed tension, much as he hated it when Caskey created it for him.

On November 18, Christopher had supper with James Whale,

the film director, his friend David Lewis, and two young makers 1 Additional details: “He has the weary face of a young officer––a boy prematurely saddled with responsibility. When women are around, he puts on a knitted wool tie and laughs with his front teeth. He grunts in the morning––surly. But likes it when I say, ‘You old cow’ or, ‘Okay, Miss Nosey.’ ”

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of “underground” films, Ken Anger and Curtis Harrington.

Christopher could remember Whale as a young cute redheaded actor in a revue at the Lyric, Hammersmith, back in the twenties, but I don’t think they had ever met before, either in England or in California, although Whale lived near the Canyon, on Amalfi Drive.

Ken Anger (whom Christopher had known since he was a strikingly attractive boy named Angermayer, fancied by Denny Fouts) showed his soon-to-become-famous film, Fireworks, which was later praised by Cocteau. Christopher didn’t like it and said so, after getting aggressively drunk on Whale’s strong martinis. He thereby offended Anger and also (to his great regret) Whale. Curtis Harrington––also destined for celebrity, if not fame––[. . .] had made a short film called Fragment of Seeking, which Christopher called Fragment of Squeaking.

On November 20, Christopher had supper with Benjamin Britten

and Peter Pears, who had just arrived in Los Angeles to give two or more concerts. The reunion was most cordial. Indeed, they both treated Christopher as the one real friend with whom they could relax from the strain of official hospitality. Christopher at once arranged to give a party, at which, he promised, they would meet as many attractive boys as he could manage to collect. The party was held on November 22. A journal entry, made earlier that day, refers to preparations for it. Christopher is jittery––chiefly because he is in the throes of nicotine disintoxication; this is his sixth day without smoking. He still fears that he will have to smoke in order to be able to write, and there is his article on Klaus Mann to be finished, as well as his current installment of Patanjali. Christopher was also jittery about the party, though without much reason, for, as usual, he had shifted the responsibility for organizing it onto someone else––Leif Argo, assisted by another friend, David Robertson. Christopher’s only legitimate worries were that he had maybe invited too many people and that he wouldn’t be able to remember all their names.1

He kept repeating them, to reassure himself.

1 In the journal, Christopher writes: “Names––Waldo Angelo, Hank Burczinsky, Hanns Hagenbuehler, Nicky Nadeau, Victor Rueda, Leif Argo, Russ Zeininger, Ted Baccardi, Amos Shepherd. American names.” In The World in the Evening (part two, chapter five) this list is partially repeated, with Nadeau changed to Naddo (probably to make it sound more exotic) and Baccardi corrected to Bachardy (in 1949, Christopher didn’t even know how to spell the name which in 1953 was to become his household word!) It must have been quite a long time before this that Christopher first noticed Ted Bachardy on the beach––maybe the previous spring, maybe as early as the fall of 1948. Ted was then in his late teens; January 16, 1949, was his nineteenth birthday. He was a dark good-looking boy with a well-made brown body; ¾ 1949 ¾

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The party wasn’t an unqualified success. The house was certainly crammed with young men who were most of them fairly attractive.

They danced together or went upstairs and necked. When invited, many had told Christopher that they were eager to meet the guests of honor, Britten and Pears––but, having done so, they quickly lost interest in them. In this gay setting, where celebrity snobbery was replaced by sex snobbery, Ben and Peter were just a pair of slightly faded limey queens, who were, furthermore, too shy and too solidly mated to join in the general kissing and cuddling. The party wasn’t really for them, though they politely pretended to believe that it was.

In the November 22 journal entry there is also a reference to an event which isn’t mentioned in the day-to-day diary: “It’s shameful and petty to have to confess it––but I despise Jim just the least bit for his behavior the other evening. Anyhow, I despise his self-pity over it. Also, he looks so silly, all banged up. But that’s unkind, and I must be very careful not to show it.”

On either November 18 or 19, quite late at night, Jim Charlton brought three or four boys over to Christopher’s house. They were Christopher found his legs outstandingly sexy. Ted had many admirers, but he didn’t flirt, didn’t eye other people. If you talked to him, he didn’t snub you but he didn’t open up. He had quiet modest good manners.

By November 1949, Christopher knew two things about Ted. One was that he now had a lover, a self-assertive [. . .] young man named Ed Cornell. The other was that he had recently had a severe mental breakdown, from which he had now apparently recovered. During the breakdown, Ted had become violent and had had to be hospitalized. Christopher had been shocked when he heard the news; he now saw Ted as a touching, threatened figure––all the more so because Ed didn’t show much sympathy for him (though, as a matter of fact, Ed had behaved quite well while Ted was sick). Christopher wasn’t seriously interested in Ted, however––merely a bit sentimental about this attractive boy menaced by insanity, and merely eager to have sex with him if this could be arranged without drama or too much exertion.

A few days before November 22, Christopher happened to meet Ted on the beach and impulsively invited him to the party. If Christopher hoped he would thus get an opportunity to date Ted alone later, he was disappointed. Ted arrived with Ed (whom Christopher had been obliged to invite also) and remained close to him throughout. When the two of them danced together, Christopher could see that Ted was very much in love. Christopher never asked Ted to the Rustic Road house again; no doubt because it seemed wasted effort to go on pursuing him. During the next three years, they saw each other only occasionally. Nevertheless, a weak link of acquaintanceship had been formed between them––a link which was just barely strong enough to draw its attached chain of beautiful and incredible consequences into Christopher’s life––the first of them being Christopher’s meeting with Ted’s four-years-younger brother, Don.

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all (I think) marines in civilian clothes. After a few drinks, Jim got into an argument with one of them (whom I’ll refer to for convenience as Red) and called him, quite casually and without venom, a son of a bitch. Red was sexy, well built and pugnacious. He declared that no one ever called him son of a bitch and got away with it, because that word was an insult to his mother. So he was going to beat Jim up. Jim said they couldn’t fight in the house, because of the furniture, or in the yard, because of the neighbors. Christopher tried to calm Red down. The other boys took no sides and didn’t seem to care what happened. But Red said that he’d either fight or go to the police and tell them that Jim had propositioned him. Finally they all drove up the hill to the Ocean Avenue park. Here Red hit Jim, who was bigger than himself, again and again until Jim’s face was bloody. Jim didn’t attempt to defend himself. He later insisted that he had done the only sensible thing. If he had fought back, the fight might well have gone on until a police car drove by, in which case they would all of them have been in trouble. Jim was right, and Christopher was right to feel ashamed of his own reactions.

Nevertheless, there was something slightly repulsive about Jim’s masochistic attitude to Red when they met again in a bar, some days after this. Jim said admiringly: “You certainly beat me up!” Red, like the silly boy he was, didn’t unbend. He replied grandly that he’d do the same thing any time to anyone who called him son of a bitch because that word etc. etc.

On November 24, Christopher ate Thanksgiving lunch with the

Beesleys and Phyllis Morris. That evening, he and Jim went to a concert given by Britten and Pears, downtown. I believe it was after this concert that Ben and Peter told him that they longed to get away to the country for a couple of days and be quiet. So Christopher arranged to take them on a short trip and he asked Jim Charlton to come along. On the 26th, they drove to Palm Springs and then on to the AJC Ranch, where they saw John van Druten. They spent the night at the Rancho Mirage, ten miles outside Palm Springs. On the 27th, they drove southwest to Mount Palomar (the day-to-day diary doesn’t actually say they visited the observatory but I assume they did), then out to the coast at Oceanside, then up to Laguna Beach, where they had supper with Chris Wood and slept at a motel nearby.

On the 28th, they drove back to Los Angeles.

I don’t have many memories of Ben and Peter during their visit or of this trip Christopher and Jim took with them. Once, when he was alone with Ben, Christopher asked (I suppose in a more or less tactful manner) if Ben ever had sex with other people. Ben said no, he was faithful to Peter, adding, “I still feel the old charm.” Another ¾ 1949 ¾

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memory is of Ben requesting Christopher, quite pleasantly, to stop singing. Christopher would do this for hours on end when he was by himself, repeating the same song over and over. A great favorite was Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry time we say goodbye . . .” because he loved attempting the transition in, “But how strange / The change / From major to minor.” This was what Ben must have found particularly painful, because Christopher had almost no ear. Also I remember that Jim asked Ben how he composed––maybe he didn’t put the question so crudely. Anyhow, Ben didn’t snub him but replied: “Well––I think I’ll begin with some strings, and then I think I’d like to bring in some woodwind, and then I think I’ll put a bit of percussion under that. . . .” (This may well be inaccurately reported and nonsense musically, but it conveys the effect which Ben’s practical, unromantic attitude had upon Christopher––who had seen so many Hollywood films about composers that he had lapsed into accepting the notion that they get their ideas by hearing a lark, or church bells, or waves on the shore.)

The trip itself was undoubtedly a success. Ben and Peter loved the desert and the mountains. They became quite schoolboyish, laughing and joking. By the time they had got to Laguna Beach and had had supper with Chris Wood, they were so relaxed that they went over to his piano of their own accord and played and sang for a couple of hours. They both liked Jim. Peter may have found him physically attractive. Anyhow, I suspect that Christopher thought he did––for, when Peter knocked on the door of their two-bed motel room next morning, Christopher exhibitionistically called to him to come in (despite Jim’s embarrassment) so that Peter should see Jim and himself naked in Christopher’s bed, where they had just finished having sex.

On November 30, Jim and Christopher went to another concert

given by Ben and Peter, at the University of Southern California.

On December 1, Christopher finished his article on Klaus Mann.

He was quite pleased with the article––and so were Thomas and Erika Mann when they read it. But, in order to finish it, he had started smoking again.1

On December 2, Christopher had lunch with Ben and Peter, just before they left Los Angeles.

1 Writing in the journal on July 3, 1951, Christopher notes that he has started another attempt to give up smoking, ten days previously, and he recalls this earlier failure: “. . . last time I quit I ran into what seemed a hopeless block––I had to get the article on Klaus Mann finished, and I just couldn’t. So I restarted smoking, and it came like magic.”

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Nicky Nadeau had taken up with an immensely rich young man

named [Karl] Hoyt. Hoyt had a big house in Bel Air. On December 3, he called up and asked Christopher if he would care to come around that evening. Hoyt’s casual tone made Christopher suppose that he was being invited over for a few drinks with the two of them, and possibly a snack in the kitchen, later. So he didn’t change his clothes or even put on a tie. But, when he drove up to the house, he was staggered to find himself in a line of cars which were being directed to parking places by several uniformed cops. Inside, a band was playing, and there were crowds of elegant guests, including some movie stars––the first person Christopher set eyes on was Hedda Hopper. Christopher was embarrassed and furious––especially when Hoyt and Nadeau greeted him in tuxedos. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t retreat––and very soon he was unembarrassed, drunk and talking to Gloria Swanson. I remember that evening as a prize specimen of the Hollywood social booby trap.

On December 4, Christopher had supper with Jim. Afterwards

they went into a bar called the Variety which was on the Pacific Coast Highway, not far from Jim’s apartment. They had visited the Variety many times before this; hitherto it had [been] a mixed bar, chiefly heterosexual but with a tolerated minority of homosexual customers. That night, however, Christopher and Jim realized at once that it must have changed managements or adopted a new

policy, for it was completely and obviously homosexual. Shortly after their arrival, the bar was raided. The cops went around taking the names of the customers. Christopher gave his name, then asked,

“What’s this all about?” He was at once told he had to come along to the police station. Jim had to come with him.

The police sergeant who was in charge of the raid proved to be a foulmouthed bull of the old school. The other cops were younger and nicer––or at least more sophisticated. The sergeant declared that he recognized Christopher from the “faggot bars” downtown.

Christopher assured him that this was impossible because he never went to them. When they got to the Santa Monica police station, the sergeant phoned headquarters to ask if Christopher and Jim had criminal records and was told, to his disgust, that they hadn’t. This made him even more aggressive. He asked Christopher and Jim,

“Are you two having a romance?” Then he had Christopher and Jim taken into separate rooms and questioned. Both of them were asked,

“Are you a queer?” Jim said, “You must ask my psychiatrist.” When the question was repeated, he answered, “No.” Christopher also said,

“No.” While the sergeant was out of the room, some of the other cops apologized, more or less, for his behavior, saying, “He’s always ¾ 1949 ¾

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like that.” They asked Christopher how many times a week he did it. They weren’t bullying now but giggly and teasing, like sexually inquisitive little boys. Christopher answered, “I don’t have to tell you that,” but, when they laughed and agreed that he didn’t have to, he did give them some kind of jokey answer, I forget what it was.

After this, Christopher and Jim were let go, with warnings not to visit that kind of bar again. It’s just possible that the cops had decided that Christopher and Jim weren’t queer, after all, and were warning them lest they should be doped or made drunk by the fiendish faggots and then raped!

This actually not very dreadful ordeal has haunted Christopher ever since. Even as I write these words, I feel bitterly ashamed of him for not having said that he was queer. And yet I’m well aware of the counterargument: why in hell should you give yourself away to the Enemy, knowing that he can make use of everything you tell him?1

On December 5, Christopher had supper with Tito Renaldo. (He

refers to this in the journal entry of December 6.) Tito had recently left Trabuco after a short try at being a monk. Christopher writes that, “Tito feels sad and lost between two worlds. He sits in his horrid moderne little apartment, waiting for the call to work at the studio, and drinking [. . .]. Soon he’ll start having sex again, then asthma.”

Poor Tito’s life became, from then on, increasingly unhappy [. . .].

He returned to live at Trabuco later, but he couldn’t settle there. He developed dark resentments against some of the other monks and revealed them in outbursts [. . .]. And yet he yearned for the Vedanta Society whenever he turned his back on it. “He clings to me,”

Christopher writes, “as the only person who can understand the particular kind of mess he’s in. But I can’t really help him.”

The December 6 journal entry also contains a passage about

getting up early and going down to the kitchen for breakfast which Christopher echoed, fifteen years later, in A Single Man. And there are a couple of paragraphs about his decision (made after talking to Dodie Smith at lunch on the 4th) to write the novel in the third person, because “I simply cannot believe in Stephen Monkhouse, or 1 In the next journal entry, December 6, Christopher writes: The utter brutality of those cops, the night before last, and my guilt that I didn’t handle them properly––wasn’t wonderful and poised and mature. I ought to have called their bluff, insisted on being locked up, hired a lawyer, taken the case to the Supreme Court, started a nationwide stink. Why didn’t I? Because I’m cowardly, slack, weak, compromised. My life at present is such a mess.

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any other fictitious character, as the narrator,” and because “I can’t narrate this myself.”1

On December 9, the day-to-day diary records that Christopher

had supper with Don Coombs and that he stayed the night. Don

Coombs taught English at UCLA. Christopher had first met him at a party at Jay’s. Maybe Jay had recommended him to Christopher as a good lay; it was Coombs who later told Christopher that he had enjoyed going to bed with Jay because “he made me feel beautiful”

(see page 29). Anyhow, Christopher had kissed Coombs at that party and it had been agreed that they would soon have a date together.

Coombs was a pretty blond with big lips. He looked much better naked than in his demurely faggy clothes. His smooth cream-skinned body was well built. He was lively and shameless and he loved to be fucked. He had big firm, hotly inviting buttocks. (The day-to-day diary also records that Christopher had been visited that afternoon by

[. . .] a tall muscular good-looking young man [he] had met on the beach. [The young man] had flattered Christopher by saying he wanted to fuck him and I believe this was the occasion on which [he]

did it. Christopher was excited to be playing the passive role for a change but he didn’t much enjoy the fucking; [the man’s] cock was too large and it hurt him.)

After Coombs’s uninhibited behavior in bed that night,

Christopher was greatly surprised when he later confessed that he had been horribly nervous about meeting Christopher. He had arrived 1 In a journal entry on December 13, Christopher writes that he is stuck again, because “Stephen can’t narrate, and yet, if he doesn’t, I can’t say half the things I want to.”

However, Christopher was continuing to work on the novel from another angle. In the large thin notebook (first referred to on page 121) there are some notes which Christopher made that same day, concerning his minor characters.

He was still intending to describe Sarah’s house, “Tawelfan,” as a hostel for European refugees, whose characters would be based on some of the real refugees at the Haverford hostel. He lists thirteen of them. He also gives a list of the bedrooms at Tawelfan with their occupants and a diagram showing where they all sat at the tables in the dining room. (Christopher much enjoyed this kind of planning.) The large thin notebook contains two drafts of openings for the novel, both probably written on December 21 though only one of them is dated. Both are fragments of a letter to Jane which Stephen is writing or composing in his head as he flies east from California to visit Sarah. The narration of the first fragment is in the third person. The second fragment is all letter, but its narration would probably have been in the third person also, if Christopher had continued writing. I’m pretty sure of this because the next two fragments, written on January 4 and January 20, 1950, are both in the third person.

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much too early for their appointment, gone into a nearby bar and downed several martinis to fortify himself, thrown up, and then managed to pull himself together so successfully that Christopher had noticed nothing strange in his manner when they finally met.

Coombs and Christopher met and fucked often after this. Coombs was prepared to admire Christopher and be amused by his jokes; he once said that Christopher had more vitality than anyone else he had ever known. Christopher had only one fault to find with Coombs; he was inclined to be stingy and never even offered to pay his share at a restaurant. Christopher finally spoke to him about this. Coombs took the rebuke in good part and afterwards told Christopher that he had been right.

On December 10, Christopher gave a party for some of the

patients from Birmingham Hospital. I don’t remember anything

about this party, as distinct from my memories of other such parties later. There was always the problem of getting the quadriplegic patient––my impression is that Christopher only knew one of these personally––out of the car and into the house. And there was always a polite awkwardness until the patients were sufficiently drunk to be able to relax. The day-to-day diary says that this party included George Bradshaw and Fred and Renée Zinnemann; these were

obviously invited because of their suitability as cohosts. I don’t know how many patients came to the party, but there can’t have been more than ten at the very most, considering the smallness of the living room and the extra space required for the wheelchairs.

Christopher’s last journal entry for 1949––on December 14––is full of self-scoldings.1 Christopher has decided that he is going 1 “Certainly, my mind is softening, weakening. I have so little coordination that I putter around like a dotard. . . . Then there is this constant sexual itch, which never seems to be satisfied, or very seldom, because it is accompanied by a certain degree of impotence.” (I’m not sure what Christopher means by this last sentence. As a result of his 1946 operation, Christopher had developed an idiosyncrasy; he could get a more complete orgasm if he pressed his thumb against a nerve at the root of his penis while he was jerking off. But this didn’t mean that he couldn’t have an orgasm during sex with another person. And if that orgasm wasn’t as complete, it could be (obviously) far more satisfactory, psychologically. When Christopher talks about his impotence, he may merely be saying that his compulsive mental “itch” drives him to attempt more sex acts than his body really “wants,” with the consequence that his sex organs refuse to cooperate.)

. . . there is a hyper-tension, worse, I think, than any I have ever experienced.

And so I fail to write. I put it off and put it off, and I do nothing about getting a job, and I drift toward complete pauperism, with nothing in 220

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through the “change of life”; he says that Gerald Heard put the idea into his head. About Caskey, Christopher writes that he hates being alone but that he doesn’t “exactly” want Caskey back “––at least, I certainly don’t want him the way he was when he left.”

On December 17, Christopher drove down to the AJC Ranch

with Russ Zeininger. John van Druten and Carter Lodge were both there and Dave Eberhardt (see page 11) was staying with them. Dave and Christopher hadn’t seen each other for a long time. No doubt they picked up their flirtation where they had dropped it, which would explain why Christopher went round to Dave Eberhardt’s

place in Los Angeles two days later, to have supper with him. (I believe Dave and Don Forbes had now [stopped sharing an apartment].) At Dave’s, that evening, was a youth named Michael

Leopold. There was a lot of talk and drinking, at the end of which Christopher decided to stay the night; perhaps he was too drunk to drive home. I’m almost certain that he didn’t go to bed with either Dave or Michael Leopold on this occasion. It could be that Dave and Michael had sex with each other. Anyhow, Michael came to visit Christopher at Rustic Road on December 23 and they started what was to be an on-and-off but longish affair.

Michael was then about eighteen; a Jewboy with thinning hair, a high forehead, spectacles (his sight was very poor), a cute cheerful face (resembling Anne Francis, a starlet of the period), a hideously ugly Texan accent (which Christopher tried to persuade him to modify) and a pair of long sturdy legs (of which Christopher

thoroughly approved). He was intelligent, ardently literary, a tireless talker and sex partner. He had a wild laugh. He amused Christopher and flattered him outrageously and excited him considerably.

Christopher later discovered that he was a pathological liar. His taste in males was catholic––ranging from boys of his own age to men in their sixties, so Christopher had no reason to feel embarrassed by the sight. I am lazy and dreamy and lecherous. . . . And I am fundamentally unserious in my approach to other people. I don’t believe in myself or my future, and all my “reputation” is just a delayed-action mechanism, which only impresses the very young.

At the end of this negative verdict––which Christopher, as usual, is evidently making as black as possible in order to cause a counterreaction and thus cheer himself up––Christopher resolves to “keep right on trying and struggling.”

I can tell that he wasn’t really worried, however. Paradoxically, despite his uneasy guilty nature, Christopher had learned to live with himself––indeed, he says as much in this same journal entry: “One of the chief benefits that remain to me from the Ivar Avenue days is that I have learned not to be alarmed by any mental symptoms, however violent or odd.” [D 1, p.419.]

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age gap. Besides, Michael was evidently drawn most strongly to elder brother and father figures. He often talked of a marine sergeant who had taken him up to a hotel room and kept him there several days a prisoner, well fed and well screwed. (This may of course have been one of Michael’s many fantasies.)

Christopher often found Michael exasperating but nevertheless became very fond of him. It was easy to love Michael in bed, he enjoyed himself so heartily, he gave his body so completely to the experience––kissing, wrestling, rimming, sucking, being fucked and fucking with equal abandon. (Once, when Christopher had got

drunk and passed out, Michael greased Christopher’s asshole and fucked him––or so he later claimed.) When Michael was reaching an orgasm, he would utter screams of lust which could surely be heard by the neighbors.

Michael stayed with Christopher at the Rustic Road house from December 26 through the 28th and returned on the 31st to spend the night––or what was left of it, by the time Christopher had got back from two New Year’s Eve parties––at Salka Viertel’s and Gottfried Reinhardt’s.1 (Despite all the pleasure he had had with Michael, Christopher’s loneliness or his mental itch caused him to get Don Coombs to come and have sex with him on December 29––either

for variety or because Michael wasn’t available.)

But Michael had more than sex to offer. He was also eager to

become Christopher’s literary disciple. He asked Christopher endless questions about writing. He dipped into the books on Christopher’s shelves and then wanted to hear Christopher’s opinion of them. He brought a story with him which he had begun to write and worked on it down in the living room while Christopher was working

upstairs in the glassed-in porch.2 Thus their brief acquaintance was 1 As I remember it, Michael didn’t come with Christopher to these parties

––either because he had parties of his own to go to or because Christopher feared that it would be embarrassing to bring him. As a homosexual, Christopher had long since made a discovery about his “understanding”

heterosexual friends; having once brought themselves to “accept” their queer friend’s “official” boyfriend, they are sincerely shocked if he shows up with other boys, even when the boyfriend is out of town. Christopher had sometimes found himself in the ridiculous and humiliating position of explaining the other boy’s presence and even apologizing for it––“He’s a friend of Billy’s,” etc.

2 On January 2, Christopher made an entry in the journal, headed “Some ideas for stories.” The first of these ideas is the life of the film dog Strongheart––or rather, an improved version of it which that seldom reliable but always magically memorable fabulist Gerald Heard had told to Christopher: “. . . the 222

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already taking on an aspect of domesticity. Christopher was under no illusions that he and Michael could set up housekeeping together.

Christopher wasn’t in love with him, wasn’t at ease with him when he chattered and showed off, didn’t believe that he had much, if any, literary talent. And yet, Christopher and Michael came close to each other; Christopher felt an unwilling kinship with this freaky young creature. They were somehow two of a kind.

On December 20 and 23, Christopher sat for the artist Nicolai Fechin. Fechin lived in a big dark old redwood house which was rather like the inside of a sailing ship––at the back of the Canyon.

He was a friend of Jo Lathwood and Ben Masselink; an amiable

Russian genius. He drew Christopher in charcoal. At the end of the first sitting, the drawing looked so wildly romantic––a kind of Nordic hero—that Christopher protested. When it was finished it had become one more in the series of Fechin’s anthropological portraits––a typical specimen of Intellectual Man––angry looking but also flattering, in a different way. I still have a photograph of it.

I don’t know what Fechin did with the original.

On December 30, Christopher had supper with the Stravinskys

and Robert Craft at their house. Aldous and Maria Huxley were very mean dog who is trained, given a wonderful disposition, so that it turns into a canine saint and finally dies trying to understand” its master and mutate into a human being.

The second idea is the story of Denny Fouts and Tony Watson-Gandy (page 173, note 1) told from the viewpoint of a fictitious character who is in love with Tony and hates the evil influence of Denny upon him.

The third idea is obviously suggested by Christopher’s relations with Michael Leopold:

A middle-aged, “established” writer and a very young writer, still unpublished. The middle-aged writer is going through a period of complete impotence, but the young one doesn’t know this. He is tremendously impressed by the older man and quite overwhelmed when the latter asks him to stay. Every morning, the young man sits down joyfully in the living room, thinking, “We are working under the same roof,” and writes as never before, in a fever of inspiration. Meanwhile, the older man goes up to his study and stays there all day, pretending to work. Does the young man unconsciously “cure” him? Perhaps.

What strikes me as remarkable here is the speed with which Christopher’s creative metabolism has functioned. Barely ten days after their first meeting, Michael has been “assimilated” and transformed into a fiction character. This was the sincerest compliment that Christopher––being Christopher––could possibly have paid him and their relationship. Michael had somehow touched the nerve of Christopher’s imagination.

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there. I have a memory––which, I believe, belongs to this occasion

––of Christopher lying on the floor, dozy with drink. Christopher looks up and sees Aldous towering skyscraper-tall above him––

ignoring Christopher with English tact, as he talks aesthetics to Igor in French.1

1 The day-to-day diary’s list of books Christopher read in 1949 includes: The Blood of the Martyrs (Naomi Mitchison), The Servant (Robin Maugham), Concluding (Henry Green), The Season of Comfort (Gore Vidal), The Narrow Corner (Maugham), The Heat of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen), The Tower of London (Ainsworth), The Ides of March (Thornton Wilder), Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), Two Worlds and Their Ways (Compton-Burnett), A Long Day’s Dying (Frederick Buechner), Love in a Cold Climate (Nancy Mitford), The Oasis (Mary McCarthy), Herself Surprised ( Joyce Cary), The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles), The Lottery (Shirley Jackson).

Christopher had reread The Narrow Corner that year because Fred Zinnemann was considering remaking it as a film. (It had already been made in 1933, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) Dipping into it before writing this (August 6, 1973) I feel again what Christopher felt then, that it is Maugham’s one really magic novel––by which I suppose I merely mean that it is the novel I would have vaguely yearned for if he hadn’t written it, the Maugham book which is custom-created for Christopher and his particular fantasies. I love its setting in the Spice Islands, its dreamy languid equatorial atmosphere, its romantic queerness. I love Dr. Saunders (the most sympathetic of all Maugham’s doctors) and Ah Kay (the most adorable of his Chinese boys) and Captain Nichols (for being so wonderful at the funeral of the Japanese pearl diver). Erik, with his goodness, is rather a bore, and so is Fred with his sulks and the stilted dialogue Maugham gives him to speak. But the poetic idea of Fred, under the curse of his own sex appeal, is terrific. I think this could be an unforgettable film, if it was directed by the right man––not Zinnemann. Zinnemann soon dropped the project.

The Tower of London was another book that Christopher reread that year. It had been one of his childhood favorites and, as far as I remember, it didn’t disappoint him at all––he still felt the magic of the Cruikshank illustrations, smelt the smell of the period and was aware of a privately perceived relationship between the Tower of London and Marple Hall. (I think this was created by Ainsworth’s narrative technique, which is absurd and yet curiously effective: in the midst of a melodramatic scene, Ainsworth will unexpectedly turn his novel into a guidebook. For example: the Spanish Ambassador, Renard, has been muttering threats against the life of Lady Jane Grey and resolves that Mary shall have the throne. Suddenly he stops to look at the White Tower, and Ainsworth describes it, ending with a couple of sentences which bring us out of the period and right up to the date when they were written: “The round turret, at the north-east angle, was used as an observatory by the celebrated astronomer Flamsteed, in the reign of Charles the Second.

The principal entrance was on the north, and was much more spacious than the modern doorway, which occupies its site.” Christopher, during his boyhood at Marple Hall, had guided visitors around and lectured them on the 224

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1950

On January 1, Bill Harris arrived to stay with Christopher. He had come from New York to California to visit his mother, who was living in La Jolla. Bill was greatly excited about Jack Fontan, his new lover. Jack had a small but prominent part in South Pacific, which had opened in New York the previous April. The character Jack played was called Staff Sergeant Thomas Hassinger on the program, but he was already known to hundreds of queers as “The Naked Sailor.”

Wearing nothing but a pair of the shortest shorts, without underwear, Jack sprawled in the midst of the group which sang “What ain’t we got? We ain’t got dames”––displaying nearly all of his large and magnificent body, including glimpses of his genitals. Bill had a reclining photograph of him stark naked; it had had to be shot in three separate sections because of Jack’s great length. Bill proudly displayed it on a shelf in the bedroom where he slept during his visit.

Bill Harris and Jack Fontan had met each other in the late fall and history of the building; he had thus developed a double-image awareness of past and present. So Ainsworth’s Victorian guidebook voice didn’t seem anachronistic to him. Quite the reverse. In the midst of these long-ago Tudor treasons and head choppings, it was Ainsworth’s voice which made history credible, and the rooms of the Tower––even its dungeons and its torture chamber––familiar and almost cozy. . . . Of course it must be added that, although Ainsworth is a painstaking antiquarian, the tone of his melodrama is unmistakably nineteenth century, not sixteenth.)

When I saw The Ides of March on the 1949 list, I couldn’t remember anything about it, except that it had been Christopher’s favorite among the new books he read that year. Now (August 19, 1973), having just finished rereading it, I admire it very much––partly because it is the kind of historical novel I would like to have written, if I were a historical novelist. Wilder is a bit too elegant for my taste, and too arch, and too much of a name-dropper––such a scholarly closet queen. But his method of telling the story through fictitious documents seems to me the best imaginable, when you’re dealing with a character as remote from us in time as Caesar is. In fictitious documents, you can stylize dialogue acceptably because the reader isn’t being asked to believe that this is exactly how the character talked. In direct narrative, the same dialogue would sound hopelessly artificial, because direct narrative makes an implicit claim to be realistic.

The Sheltering Sky was Christopher’s first experience of Paul Bowles’s writing. He felt that he liked the book––particularly its evocation of North Africa––much better than he liked its author’s tone of voice. Bowles has an air of only just barely tolerating the presence of the reader. “Don’t stick around on my account,” he seems to be saying, “you’re going to loathe this place”

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Bill had immediately moved in with Jack, who was living in an abandoned synagogue. When the cold weather began, their waterpipes froze. Bill had to fetch water in pails from a shop below––he spoke of himself as being “like Rebecca at the well.” The cold was so intense that they couldn’t get warm even when holding each other in bed. Bill and Jack tried to remedy this by lifting the bed onto two chests of drawers––one at each end––over the gas oven, but, when they climbed into bed, the bed broke in half. Since they couldn’t use the toilet, they had to shit into newspapers and then leave their shit packages outside on the windowsill until they froze solid and could be carried downstairs and left in a trash can. . . . Bill described these hardships to Christopher with the sentimental relish of an infatuated lover.

(To return to the subject of Jack Fontan’s shorts in South Pacific, Jack tells me––August 4, 1973––that, when rehearsals started, the minor characters were given a pile of military garments and told to pick out the ones that fitted them. So Jack got himself a navy work-shirt, pants and a pair of shoes. When Joshua Logan, the director, arrived to inspect the costumes, he promptly ordered Jack to take off his shirt and his shoes. He then called for a pair of scissors and snipped (indicating the Sahara desert) “and you’ll never understand these people”

(meaning the Arabs). Christopher felt, and I still feel, that Bowles’s arrogance is peculiarly Frog––you could call him an English-speaking French anti-novelist. But, still and all, he’s readable and few of the Frogs are.

Christopher liked Two Worlds and Their Ways as much but no more than he had liked Manservant and Maidservant. However, Two Worlds and Their Ways contains a tremendous passage which Christopher has been quoting ever since he read it: “We think our little failings have their own charm. And they have not. And they are great failings.” The Blood of the Martyrs disappointed him.

Mitchison was suffering, he thought, from leftist Christianity––which is the dreariest kind of leftism, and of Christianity. . . . Concluding disappointed him too: it seemed rather dull. . . . Being almost invariably bored by satire, he wasn’t disappointed in Nineteen Eighty-Four––merely bored by it. . . . The Servant is mere closet-macabre––one of those novels in which queerness is equated with Evil and loss of class status with Degradation. . . . Christopher thought The Season of Comfort better than Gore Vidal’s earlier novels––excluding Williwaw

––but that wasn’t saying much. . . . In a journal entry of March 2, 1949, Christopher quoted an arty-farty phrase from The Heat of the Day, which he hadn’t yet finished. “Quite exciting,” he adds, “and some good characters”––but my memory assures me that it was trash. . . . Christopher recommended A Long Day’s Dying in a blurb. I can’t remember why. I have never been able to get through any other book by its author; when you open them, moths fly out. . . . As for the other books on the list (by Mitford, McCarthy, Cary and Jackson) Christopher found them charming, entertaining, clever and altogether worthy of praise––by The New Yorker. They weren’t, any of them, his dish.

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away the legs of Jack’s pants, just above the knee. This didn’t satisfy him, however. He kept snipping higher and higher, until Jack’s legs were left bare right up to the crotch. Logan then decided that Jack could put the shoes on again.

Jack wasn’t in the habit of wearing underwear. So he came on

stage on the first night with nothing under his shorts. After the show had been running a few days, the stage manager told him there had been complaints from ladies sitting in the front rows. Jack was to put on jockeys. When Logan heard of this, he was very angry. The

jockeys were prohibited. Logan’s instructions to the box-office were:

“If they don’t want to see his balls, they can have their money returned.”)

Bill Harris stayed at the Rustic Road house during most of

January––from the 1st to the 11th, from the 17th to the 28th and from the 31st to February 3, when he returned to New York. The visit was a success, from Christopher’s point of view; Bill was a model guest, helpful with household chores, always ready to make himself agreeable to callers and to keep himself occupied when Christopher had to work or go out. Aside from this, he was a cheerful, responsive companion. He showed an interest in all Christopher’s doings and concerns which seemed feminine in the very best way. I think Bill enjoyed his visit too––even including his unpleasant psychic

experience which is described on pages 184‒185. This was anyhow a happy period in his life, because of Jack Fontan––and there is a peculiar pleasure in talking about a current love affair to a sympathetic ex-lover. Bill and Christopher shared pleasant memories of sex with each other. Bill knew that Christopher’s interest in Jack Fontan was therefore more than merely polite; it had a quality of identification.

But Bill also knew that Christopher wasn’t in the slightest degree jealous, wasn’t carrying even the last ember of a torch. So the two of them could be perfectly relaxed together.

On January 3, there is a journal entry about The School of Tragedy.

Christopher is still bothered by the problem of narration––shall it be told in the third person or in the first? Christopher obviously wanted to write in the first person, through Stephen’s mouth, but he saw two difficulties if the story is told retrospectively, “I fear the necessarily indulgent tone, the wise smile over the mistakes of the past”; but if, on the other hand, the story is told from day to day, in a diary, “This seems too contrived. Why should he be taking all this trouble to present his experiences, to make them into an aesthetic performance, if he is really suffering?”

So Christopher returns to a consideration of a narrative in the third person, “I . . . hear a very simple tone of voice. Something inside me ¾ 1950 ¾

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keeps saying Candide. . . . When I want him to be articulate, analytical, he must express himself in conversation. Ditto when he tells anything about the past. But when we’re listening to his mind, we should really only get his feelings. Very important, this.”

In this entry, Christopher also tries to state the theme of the novel––that Stephen, who is chronically guilty because he is torn between a Quaker background and an urge toward bohemianism,

discovers how to overcome his guilt “by understanding the lives of those who aren’t guilty––Sarah, [Gerda,] Dr. Kennedy and the best of the refugees.”

Looking back, I feel that a novel written by Christopher with this subject matter was foredoomed. Because Christopher didn’t––and I still don’t––understand the kind of guilt which would make such a story credible. To a writer of my temperament, prolonged guilt is distasteful and boring as a theme for fiction. The character of Stephen Monk doesn’t come to life because Christopher was bored by him.

At the very end of the book, Stephen says, “I . . . forgive myself from the bottom of my heart,” but his tone rings false. The words were actually Christopher’s; he had once said them to Iris Tree, but in a quite different, campy, playacting tone, with a deep comic sigh, when they were talking about sin: “God knows, Iris, I forgive myself

––from the bottom of my heart.” After which they had both roared with laughter. When Stephen speaks the line one doesn’t laugh. One is embarrassed.

On January 5, there is a charming anecdote about Bo and Kelley (see pages 17‒18) in the journal. For reasons of discretion, presumably, they are referred to in the journal by initials only, and nothing is said about why Kelley was in jail at that time. As far as I remember, he had been arrested on the Riviera Beach near Point Dume. This beach was perfectly safe for bare-ass swimming and sex making in 1945 (see page 48) but more and more houses had been built on the headland since then and their builders thought they had bought the view as well. So they proceeded to edit it to their liking.

Those tiny figures in the far distance, away down there amongst the dunes––you couldn’t see if they were nude or make out what they were doing, unless you used binoculars. So the police were called in and given binoculars and told to watch. And so there were roundups of view spoilers––one of which included Kelley. (In those days, when a queer had served a jail sentence and his straight friends asked him what he had been in jail for, he would reply, with a wry, suggestive smile, “Making a U-turn.” Such is the humor of a persecuted tribe, which isn’t allowed even to speak openly of its sufferings.) This is the anecdote: Bobo took Howard Kelley a sweater to wear in jail.

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Kelley spent a whole afternoon, with another prisoner, cleaning it by picking off hairs belonging to Bo and Kelley’s three cats. Kelley was able to identify the hairs of each cat. They sorted the hairs into three piles and put each pile into a separate matchbox.

On January 13, Christopher had Norman Mailer to dinner, with

Salka Viertel (who probably helped cook). The day-to-day diary also mentions “Ted and Mrs. Anderson, John and Mrs. Hamlin” as

guests. I’m pretty sure that Ted Anderson and John Hamlin were paraplegics, and that it was Ted who had given Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman (see page 205) a lot of advice while The Men was being written and filmed. Indeed, I think the character played by Brando in the film was to some extent based on Ted Anderson. In the film, Brando marries Teresa Wright and they go through the problem of an impotent paraplegic married to a sexually potent and physically active woman. At the end of the film they are still together, however.

Ted and his wife finally split up, but that was after a fairly long marriage.

Norman Mailer was in town (I think) because of a project to film his novel The Naked and the Dead. (There were many delays and the picture wasn’t actually made and released until 1958.) Norman and Christopher got along well together. Norman, in those days, was a deceptively quiet and polite young man who amused Christopher by his sudden outbursts of candor. They didn’t meet often, but I am unable to put a date––unless it is this one––to my memory

of Norman entertaining a fairly large group of paraplegics at Christopher’s house.1 According to my memory, Christopher had asked his paraplegic guests in advance if there was any available celebrity they would like to meet. All had agreed on Mailer. He arrived on time, neatly dressed, demure and sober. The women

present were obviously reassured. Then he began to tell stories about his army life––perfectly harmless funny little stories, with no horrors in them, no sex, no venereal disease. All that was startling was the dialogue. “By that time, the sergeant was beginning to get a little bit impatient, so he said to me––” Mailer kept the same nicey-nice party smile on his face as he continued, without the least change of tone,

“Why, you mother-fucking son of a bitch, another word out of

you and I’ll ram this mop right up your ass!” The male guests roared.

The women blinked and tried to smile––reflecting, no doubt, that they had read talk as rough as this in Mailer’s novel; coming from 1 If Mailer had been at the party on December 10, the day-to-day diary would surely have mentioned him. On March 10, 1950, Mailer visited Christopher with his wife but nothing is said about any other guests.

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his mouth, you couldn’t call it vulgarity; it was practically literature.

On January 17, Aldous Huxley and Christopher met and talked

about their film story Below the Equator (see page 207 [note]). On the 23rd, they met again, this time with John Huston. I think it was Huston who had originally suggested that they should write a story for him to direct. Meanwhile, on January 19, the day-to-day diary records that Christopher saw Lesser Samuels about a movie story.

This must have been The Vacant Room, a ghost story set in a Los Angeles bungalow court. I think the original idea was Lesser’s, but Christopher was particularly interested in showing that a “haunting”

can take place in an unremarkable small modern building.

On January 22, Russ Zeininger, Curtis Harrington, Bill Harris and Christopher drove to The High Valley Theatre in the Upper Ojai Valley (see page 74) to see a performance of Ethan Frome. It had been adapted by Iris Tree (who was later sued by the owners of the authorized adaptation, which Ruth Gordon had played in New

York). Iris, Ford Rainey and Betty Harford played Zeena, Ethan and Mattie. Oliver Andrews, Betty’s future husband, designed the set

––which is the only part of the production I remember, because it was so absurdly arty. Oliver decided that the bobsled was the symbol of the whole tragedy and that it therefore ought to dominate the stage throughout. So there it was at the back of the set, standing on its end and looking like an expressionist war memorial. This in itself would have been stupid rather than absurd. But then the moment came when Ethan and Mattie had to convert the symbol into a stage prop.

Placing the sled in a horizontal position on top of a steep structure which represented a hill, they climbed onto it and rode it offstage.

The hazards of this ride were ridiculously realistic. The heavy sled shook the lightweight hill to its foundations and, a moment later, it could be heard and felt hitting a bank of cushions behind the scenes with a force which seemed sufficient to carry it straight through the wall of the theater. The whole audience gasped––but it was the wrong kind of gasp, expressing concern for the fate of Ford Rainey and Betty Harford, as if they had been circus acrobats risking their lives. At that instant, they ceased to be Ethan and Mattie. This farcical stunt annihilated their characters and nullified the rest of the play.1

Throughout February, Christopher worked on the two film

1 These negative impressions are all that remain now. But maybe Christopher liked the acting at the time when he saw it. Either that, or he was being very polite when he gave a quote which The Los Angeles Times printed: “The best acting I have ever seen this unusually talented group do.” (Betty Harford showed me the clipping, October 1973.)

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stories, with Huxley and with Samuels. Mike Leopold came down to stay with him several times; Christopher also saw Russ Zeininger and Don Coombs. He had supper with the Stravinskys, Jo and Ben

Masselink, the Kiskaddens, the Zinnemanns. The Zinnemanns often showed their guests a film, after supper. On February 25, Dr. Bors (from the Birmingham Hospital, see page 205) was one of the

Zinnemanns’ guests. He proudly announced that he had brought a film of his own which he was going to run for them. It turned out to be a documentary of an unusually bloody operation, shot in color.

Some of the ladies present were so revolted that they nearly vomited.

But Dr. Bors was happily unaware of this. He left under the

impression that he had provided everybody with a delightful

evening’s entertainment. (A few days before this, The Men had been screened for the patients at Birmingham Hospital. Christopher had gone there to see it.)

On March 5, Samuels and Christopher finished The Vacant Room.

Christopher continued to work with Huxley on Below the Equator and Samuels was asked to give them his advice––they met three times. When Samuels and Christopher turned in a copy of their story to Christopher’s agent, Jim Geller, Christopher typed a special title page for it: “The Vacant Room. A Masterpiece.” The joke fell flat, because Geller couldn’t get anybody interested in the story.

Christopher saw Mike Leopold only four times that month. I

think Christopher must also have been going to bed with Jim

Charlton, because only one other sex mate (Zeininger) is mentioned in the day-to-day diary and because Christopher and Jim had supper together often.

On the 16th, Christopher had supper with the Huxleys. Gerald

Heard and Michael Barrie were there, also a hypnotist named Leslie LeCron1 and his wife. On the 22nd, the LeCrons invited Christopher to have supper at their house. There were no other guests. I think it had been more or less agreed in advance that LeCron would try to hypnotize Christopher. Christopher himself was skeptical. Several people had tried to hypnotize him already and had failed. He told LeCron this, and LeCron replied that the failure had probably been due to Christopher’s attitude. Christopher expected a hypnotist to overpower his will. “That’s the wrong attitude,” LeCron told him,

“you have to cooperate. I can’t make you do anything as long as you think of me as an opponent and keep bracing yourself to resist me.

My will isn’t stronger than yours. You mustn’t think like that.”

1 The word “hypnotist” always sounds slightly derogatory. Aldous, who greatly respected and liked LeCron, refers to LeCron in his letters as a psychotherapist.

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LeCron certainly didn’t look as if his will was stronger than Christopher’s, or anybody else’s. From Christopher’s point of view LeCron’s amiably harmless appearance was reassuring and it undoubtedly contributed to the success of their experiment. As far as I remember, LeCron told Christopher to fix his eyes on one of

LeCron’s eyes and begin to count backwards from one hundred.

Very soon, Christopher found himself relaxing from an upright to a horizontal position on the sofa. He lay there in a comfortable sprawl, feeling, as he said, like a puppet with all its strings loose. He was quite conscious and rather amused by his condition. He told LeCron that he knew he could assert his will but that he simply didn’t want to.

He remained in this light hypnotic trance for several minutes, until LeCron roused him by snapping his fingers.

Christopher’s relaxation had been even deeper than he had

realized. This only became evident to him after he had left LeCron’s house and was driving home. He experienced a state of euphoria so intense that I can recall it as I write these words. Christopher was no longer an individual driver, keeping a wary eye on other drivers––

alert for possible drunks, slowing down to force tailgaters to pass him, pulling out to avoid being trapped behind slowpokes. He was part of the traffic, moving in perfect harmony with all the other cars, like a dancer in a ballet. Never once, that evening, did he have to brake or accelerate abruptly; when he changed lanes, he described faultless curves, slipping into his new position with exactly the right amount of spare distance between himself, the car ahead and the car behind.

Christopher thought of himself as being a well-adjusted driver. He was seldom consciously nervous even in bad weather and heavy

traffic. But now he realized how tense he ordinarily was.

At the end of the hypnotizing, LeCron had given Christopher a posthypnotic suggestion: “You’re going to sleep better tonight than you’ve ever slept before.” When Christopher got into bed, he did indeed fall into a profound sleep, from which he woke next morning unable to remember who or where he was for several seconds. This moment of amnesia wasn’t in the least alarming. It was accompanied by a sense of calm joy.

On April 2, Christopher had supper with Mr. and Mrs. Richard

Brooks. Christopher probably first met Brooks when they were both working at MGM in 1948. I may be wrong but I think that this

supper party was at a house the Brookses were living in on the slopes of the Hollywood Hills looking out over the Valley. Anyhow,

Christopher did visit them in such a house and later used it for the setting of the first scene of The World in the Evening. I remember that they kept their bedroom immaculately neat, with all their clothes and 232

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superfluous belongings stored away in adjoining closets or bathrooms. When they entertained, the guests were free––were indeed almost challenged––to wander through this bedroom as though it were an extra living room. The Brookses seemed to be saying: “Go ahead––search! You won’t find any clue to our private life, or to what sort of people we really are.”

There was, nevertheless, one damning clue to Richard’s character which lay hidden in the house––and which Richard, character-istically, couldn’t resist the temptation to reveal––the living room was wired for sound. At the end of the evening, Richard would play back the tape to any guests who cared to listen––thereby, I suppose, making at least a few permanent enemies at each party. I remember a recorded murmur of unintelligible drunken conversation, out of which Christopher’s voice arose, embarrassingly clear and precise, saying: “King Lear really is a most extraordinarily silly story!”

On April 9, Christopher had supper with Speed Lamkin. I guess this must have been their first meeting. I have no idea who brought them together. Possibly, Speed simply phoned Christopher and

introduced himself; that would have been like him. I don’t recall how Christopher then reacted to this bold sexy naughty niggery young man,1 with his mischievous eyes and “aw, c’mon––you know you want to” grin. Speed’s first novel, Tiger in the Garden, was being published that year, and his self-confidence was overwhelming.

Probably Christopher was a bit overwhelmed, a good deal amused and intrigued, but very much on his guard. I say this because he took Speed after supper to see Jim Charlton––which suggests that he wanted to park Speed in Jim’s bed, rather than face three or four more hours of Speed’s sparkling dialogue. Speed was really funny, but his name-dropping soon got to be a bore and his tale telling was so indiscreet that you became afraid to open your mouth lest you should provide him with more gossip fodder. . . . All in all, I’m sure Christopher would have been very much surprised if he had been told, then, that he would one day become really fond of Speed and even take Speed’s opinions seriously.

On April 10, fairly early in the morning, Christopher got a call from Dylan Thomas, whom he had never met. Dylan was downtown at the Biltmore and due to give a reading at UCLA that

afternoon. The UCLA English department had made no arrange-

ments for his transportation out to the campus, merely told him to take a bus. Christopher found this outrageous and volunteered to drive down and pick him up.

1 Speed was then twenty-two.

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The events of that memorable day were recorded in the

journal––not at the time but much later, on December 8, 1953, about a month after Dylan’s death. (Stephen Spender had asked

Christopher to contribute to some obituary article on Dylan and Christopher had declined, saying that his memories involved other people, who might be offended––he meant chiefly Majal Ewing,

head of the UCLA English department. But it was Stephen’s request which prompted Christopher to make this journal entry.)[*]

The journal records only Ivan Moffat’s account of Dylan’s visit to Charlie Chaplin, that evening––which is that Dylan was drunk and that Chaplin was therefore offended. But I remember another

version of the story (by Frank Taylor?) which sounds truer and is certainly funnier: when Chaplin was asked if Dylan might visit him, he said, “Yes, but don’t bring him unless he’s sober.” Dylan’s escorts, including Ivan and Christopher, agreed to this. However, when they all arrived, the escorts were stumbling drunk and it was only Dylan who made a perfect gentlemanly entrance, saying in bell-clear tones,

“It’s a great honor to meet you, Mr. Chaplin.”

On April 19, Caskey returned to Rustic Road, after an absence of just over five months. Since I don’t have any of Caskey’s letters belonging to that period, I don’t know what the atmosphere of their reunion was. Had they discussed their difficulties and resolved to make a fresh start? Or had they avoided discussion, just hoping for the best? I strongly suspect the latter. In a journal entry made on April 24, Christopher doesn’t mention Caskey at all. This may mean that Christopher is superstitiously afraid of writing anything optimistic about the prospects for their life together.

They started seeing people at once––Hayden Lewis, Rod Owens,

Jim Charlton, Lennie Newman, the Beesleys and Jay Laval, who was now in charge (I believe) at the Mocambo. On April 23, they went to dinner with the Chaplins. Emlyn and Molly Williams were there too. I’m pretty sure that they had never met Chaplin before.

Toward the end of dinner, as I remember it, Christopher went out of the dining room to pee. When he returned to the table, he found that Emlyn was questioning Chaplin, while the other guests sat silent, listening. Emlyn is a shockingly frank questioner. His manner is at once authoritative and playful, never in the smallest degree apologetic. He questions you with the air of a doctor, who has the right to ask his patient absolutely anything and who is teasing the patient for being embarrassed and reluctant to answer. Chaplin was

[* See D 1, pp. 458–63.]

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certainly embarrassed. As Christopher entered, Emlyn was asking:

“Mr. Chaplin,1 tell me––did Mr. Hearst really murder Mr. Ince?”

Charlie wriggled in his seat: “No––no of course not. That story’s ridiculous––absolutely untrue.”

“But Mr. Chaplin, you were––involved with Miss Marion Davies?”

This time, Chaplin glanced quickly down the table to be sure that Oona wasn’t present––she too had left the table. “Well yes, yes I was.”

“But didn’t Mr. Hearst know that?”

“Yes. I suppose so. He must have known. Yes, I’m sure he did.”

“And didn’t he object?”

“Oh yes, he certainly objected. But, after all,” Chaplin was still acting embarrassed, only now it was obvious that he was beginning to enjoy Emlyn’s cross-examination, “there wasn’t much he could do about it.”

“Mr. Chaplin––did you have an affair with Miss Pola Negri?”

“No. Oh no. Absolutely not. Quite out of the question. Wasn’t my type at all.”

Who knows what else Emlyn might have asked! Alas, right after Chaplin’s reply, Oona came back into the room and that page of Hollywood history was blotted forever.

On May 13, Christopher and Caskey went to the Chaplins’

again––for what was to be, unless the day-to-day diary has omitted to record a later meeting, Christopher’s last visit. (Caskey went to lunch with them next day, alone.) So it would appear that this was the evening on which Christopher is alleged to have passed out and peed on a sofa––see page 199 and [note]. 2

There was another dramatic incident at the Chaplins’ which I

can’t put a date to exactly––it may well have happened earlier that evening. All I am sure of is that it was at a dinner at which Natasha 1 In this dialogue, Emlyn Williams very slightly accented the misters and the miss. The effect was mocking, but the mockery was so subtle that Chaplin would only have made himself ridiculous if he had taken offense at it.

2 Since writing this, I discovered from the day-to-day diary for 1951 that Christopher and Caskey went to a party at the Chaplins’ on March 24. This seems to prove that the alleged peeing incident took place then, and not on May 13, 1950. Still, it should be noticed that ten months elapsed between the two meetings. So it could be argued that the alleged peeing did take place (seemingly or actually) on May 13, 1950, that the Chaplins were angry with Christopher for a long while but then decided to give him another chance, that he was invited on March 24, 1951 but behaved badly, and that therefore they struck him off their guest list forever. In any case, March 24, 1951 does seem to have been their last meeting.

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Moffat (see pages 66‒67) was present––which means that Ivan was probably there too.

When the guests took their places in the dining room, Natasha and Caskey found that they were to sit next to each other. Whereat Natasha exclaimed, loudly and clearly: “Oh good, Billy! I always like sitting next to a pansy.” Natasha was now entering her lively, crazy phase, in which she would often behave in this “spontaneous” style.

This was no intended bitchiness. From her point of view, she was being friendly. She quite liked Caskey and she was implying that he, like other pansies, was an entertaining dinner partner. That was all.

It was more than enough. The deathly silence which followed her remark proved that everybody at the table had heard it.

In the midst of that silence, with the utmost good humor, in his laziest southern drawl, Caskey replied: “Your slang is out of date, Natasha––we don’t say ‘pansy’ nowadays. We say ‘cocksucker.’ ”

I don’t think anybody ventured to laugh. Such words were still genuine shockers in those days. But there was a surge of grateful relief. A member of the insulted minority had spoken up, thereby saving the majority from the embarrassment of trying to defend it and him––or from the guilt of failing to do so. No doubt the several Jews present were especially conscious of this. Natasha herself, amused but not in the least abashed by Caskey’s retort, began talking to him about something else. Christopher, who truly adored Caskey at such moments, sat glowing with pride in him. But Christopher’s pride can’t have been visible to others––at least, not to the lady who sat at his side. She, kind soul, evidently supposed that his feelings had been deeply wounded. In a muddle-headed attempt to console him for being what he was, she told him, “You mustn’t feel too badly about this.” Then, lowering her voice and glancing over at her husband, she added, “You know something? Bob and I can’t have children either!”

On May 15, Christopher went to the NBC studios to listen to a radio performance of Prater Violet. I can’t remember who was in this, but it seemed fairly effective.[*]

Also on May 15––and again on the 17th and 23rd––Christopher

visited Leslie LeCron. I think this was to take lessons in autohypnotism, which was one of LeCron’s specialties. LeCron claimed (and Aldous Huxley confirmed this) that it is possible to put yourself into a light hypnotic trance, for the purpose of overcoming anxiety, relaxing and sleeping. According to LeCron, this kind of trance is

[* Fritz Field, Whitfield Connor, Eileen Erskine, Ramsay Hill; adapted by Richard E.

Davis, directed by Andrew Clore. The one-hour broadcast was on May 14 with Don Rickles announcing and a commentary by Irwin Edman.]

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never dangerously deep––if the house were to catch fire, you would regain normal consciousness at once. Christopher never mastered the autohypnotic technique––maybe he was afraid of using it, despite LeCron’s reassurances. But he did sometimes use, with good effect, a method of autosuggestion which LeCron had also taught him. First you lie on your back on the floor. Then you successively tense and relax the muscles in every part of your body, from head to feet. Then you tell yourself a story about yourself, in the third person. The story varies, according to the kind of result you want to produce. You could say, for example: “His energy was amazing. People said that he ran up and down stairs like a young man. His sitting posture was perfect, so he was able to write hour after hour without tension.

Then he could run on the beach for a mile or more, dismissing all worries from his head and enjoying the strength of his own body, like an animal. When night came, he was all ready for fun, parties, entertainment, sex––” Or you could say: “He was exhausted––

absolutely worn out and happy to rest, knowing that he had done his work well and earned his repose. Tired, relaxed, content, his mind quite calm, he lay waiting for sleep––”

On June 5, Aldous Huxley and Christopher finished their film

[*]

story, Beyond the Horizon (Equator?)

On June 7, Christopher went for the first time to the Long Beach Veterans Hospital. Many, if not all of the paraplegics he had been visiting at Birmingham (see page 204) had just been transferred there.

This was a much longer drive and in those days, before the freeways had been built, it took a lot more time than it would now.

Christopher was probably unwilling to admit to himself, at first, that the extra distance would gradually deter him from going there. He would have done better to break off his visiting at once. As it was, he impressed and pleased the paraplegics he knew by seeming to have remained faithful to them. Later, when he stopped coming to Long Beach, they must have felt that he had let them down.

The day-to-day diary also records that on June 7 Christopher began a rough draft of The School of Tragedy. The large thin notebook has a June 7 entry which Christopher probably wrote to get himself into the mood to start work. Characteristically, Christopher begins with a pessimistic statement: “Now, after all these delays and in-decisions, I must admit to myself that I still don’t see my way clearly.”

He is subconsciously trying to use negative suggestion here––to make himself write by saying, “Don’t––you’re not ready.”

On June 12, Christopher saw LeCron again. I may be wrong but

[* The screenplay was first called Below the Equator and later retitled Below the Horizon.]

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I believe this was the occasion on which LeCron began urging

Christopher to practice the techniques of Dianetics. Ron Hubbard’s book had just been published and LeCron took it very seriously.1 He wanted Christopher to “restimulate his engrams,” and specifically to try to reexperience his own birth. Christopher didn’t want to try.

He decided that LeCron was crazy, as far as this one subject was concerned, and he got himself out of LeCron’s office as quickly and politely as he could. LeCron didn’t take offense at this. He and Christopher continued to see each other socially.

June 14. Swami had an operation––I’m nearly sure it was for

hernia––at the Queen of Angels Hospital. In the large thin notebook Christopher writes that he has roughed out the opening of the novel but that he feels that he has only a beginning and an end, very little 1 Here is an outline of Hubbard’s theory, taken from Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman, published in 1972. Kaufman is admittedly hostile but probably not too unfair:

The single source of our grief here on earth is found to lie in engrams, recordings of overwhelmingly painful events which, unbeknownst to us, were imprinted on our reactive minds over the years whenever the analytical mind shorted-out due to stress.

. . . One has only to locate these incidents on the patient’s time track and have him relive them in all their grisly detail. Several relivings are generally sufficient to erase an engram and its harmful effect. A person who gets rid of all his engrams in this manner is called a Clear. He is then completely free from neuroses and psychosomatic symptoms, gifted with total recall, and possessed of an almost superhuman I.Q. . . .

However, I don’t believe that Christopher’s refusal to try Dianetics was simply due to skepticism. Christopher had––and I still have––a deep-seated reluctance to try tinkering with his own psychological mechanism. When Christopher was young, he would have explained this reluctance by saying that he was afraid of inhibiting his creative process; while at Cambridge, he had been told of a young Georgian poet who was unable to write a single line after having been “successfully” psychoanalyzed. Nowadays, I would say I believe that the unconscious must by its nature remain unconscious. It doesn’t belong to me. It is my means of communication with what is nonpersonal and eternal.

All attempts to meddle with it are therefore attempts to impose my will and my ideas of what is good for me upon the infinitely greater wisdom of the nonself.

As such they can only be self-damaging and anyhow doomed to failure. (To do Ron Hubbard justice, it must be said that he can have had no such qualms

––for, in those days at any rate, he didn’t believe that there is any such thing as the unconscious. According to him, man has only a conscious analytical mind and a reactive mind which is, to quote from Robert Kaufman, “a stimulus–

response mechanism, a moronic, miasmal carryover from caveman days”––

utterly inferior to the conscious mind, in other words, and an obstacle to our development as human beings.)

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to put in the middle. Also he is worried that he won’t be able to make his characters interesting––there are so many of them. He tries to find an “experience” for each of the principal characters––something from which each one of them can learn his or her lesson in The School of Tragedy. He makes a list of these experiences. And then draws one of his not very illuminating diagrams.

June 15. Gerald Heard, Margaret Gage (at whose house Gerald

was living), Michael Barrie and Mr. and Mrs. LeCron came to 333

East Rustic Road after supper, bringing with them a medium named Sophia Williams. My impression is that Christopher and Caskey had also invited a few people––maybe Hayden Lewis, Rod Owens,

Lennie Newman, Carlos McClendon.

Sophia Williams had been “discovered,” I think, by the Huxleys.

She displayed her powers in the interests of psychic research, not for money. Exactly what her powers were was a question which

interested Gerald particularly. It was probably he who had arranged for this sitting.

As I remember, the party sat down on a semicircle of chairs in the living room, facing towards its windows which overlooked the creek. Sophia Williams sat more or less in the middle of the semicircle. She wasn’t isolated from the others. She could easily have touched either of her neighbors. One of these was Gerald.

Sophia made no attempt to create a “spiritual” atmosphere. She said that the electric lights could be left on and that people could smoke and drink if they wished. She herself took a Scotch. I believe she smoked too, but I won’t swear to that.

After a short period of silence, a sound was heard––at first it seemed like the whine of a mosquito. The sound came out of the empty space near the windows; it was definitely localized. As they all listened, it became louder or more distinct and was recognizable as a tiny voice.

If only Christopher had written down in his journal at least a few of the things it said. Why didn’t he? Because, as usual, he was too lazy. Because, no doubt, his next morning’s memory was fuddled with drink. However, I do remember that he and Caskey and their guests were much more impressed by the voice itself than they were by its statements, which seemed to them to be rather ordinary séance talk. Questioned by Sophia, the voice said it was Christopher’s father. I’m pretty sure that Christopher had already told Sophia that his father was dead––and this seemed anyhow to be a suspiciously conventional act of politeness, that the Spirit World should choose to address Sophia’s senior host. The voice certainly wasn’t Frank’s voice, even allowing for psychic distortion and “long distance,” and ¾ 1950 ¾

239

it told Christopher nothing that Sophia couldn’t have known or guessed at.

Next day, Caskey and Christopher discussed the séance with

Gerald Heard. He was inclined to believe that Sophia Williams had produced the voice ventriloquially, perhaps without being conscious that she was doing so. While the voice was speaking, Gerald had watched her and seen that there was great tension in the muscles of her neck and back. He agreed that the production of the voice at this distance from the ventriloquist would anyhow be a remarkable feat.

Quite aside from the voice, Sophia managed to astonish them all, that evening. While they were sitting there, the frogs in the channel outside the windows set up a concerted croaking. This was usual at that time of the year––it was so loud that it could be heard right across the Canyon. Someone said jokingly to Sophia that she should make the frogs be quiet. She answered, in a matter-of-fact way, that she would try. Almost at once, the frogs stopped croaking and were silent from then on.

On June 17, Christopher went to visit Swami at the Queen of

Angels Hospital––he was the pet of all the nuns. Probably their enthusiasm for his cuteness and sweetness was complicated by a sense of guilt; under the pretext of nursing him, they were associating with a preacher of a heathen cult, and not even trying to get him to see the Light!

On June 18 and 20, there are entries in the large thin notebook which show that Christopher is worried about the great number of characters in his novel. But he hasn’t yet seriously considered the possibility of getting rid of them, because he is still determined to write about his life at the Haverford refugee hostel. Instead, he plans to change the character of Sarah (Caroline Norment) and make her

“a happy-go-lucky, the-Lord-will-provide kind of person.” By

doing this, he reasons, the hostel will become “much more of a mess

. . . and . . . the more of a mess it is, the more opportunities I obviously have for being interesting and amusing about it.” (When one watches a writer––especially if he is oneself––floundering about like this, one begins to dream of a computer which would present his material to him in terms of all the conceivable ways it could be handled––thereby saving him from wasting months, even years. Or are these flounderings of some ultimate value?)

On June 21, Caskey and Christopher went down to Long Beach

Veterans Hospital.

On June 25, Christopher had breakfast with Swami, who must

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a reading at the temple, as he sometimes did when there was no one available to give a proper lecture.

On June 28, Christopher went to Long Beach Hospital alone. At Long Beach, for some reason I don’t remember, he found himself visiting T.B. patients as well as paraplegics. Before he visited the T.B.

ward, it had been explained to him that he ought to take two

precautions against infection––he should wear a white hospital gown over his clothes and he shouldn’t come too near the patient or sit on his bed. No doubt the doctors themselves thought these precautions were exaggerated and only passed them on to visitors because the hospital insurance regulations so required. But Christopher couldn’t resist milking a little melodrama from the situation. He pointedly didn’t wear a hospital gown and did sit on beds. He also called his friends’ attention to the fact that he was behaving in this way, saying that self-protective precautions only raised a barrier between you and the patients––you couldn’t talk to them naturally if you were treating them as unclean. Which was true. Still, the fact remained that Christopher was posing as a fearless Francis of Assisi.

A journal entry on June 29 is prompted by the Korean War, which had begun on June 25 and had already caused Truman to send air and naval units to fight the North Koreans. Christopher quotes two sentences from a diary which he had been keeping during the

Munich Crisis of 1938: “From now on, I’ll try to write every day. It will be a discipline––and these messages from the doomed ship may even be of some value, to somebody, later.” Applied to the Korean War by an overage civilian sitting in safety thousands of miles away, this sounds fairly hysterical. But Christopher wasn’t alone in fearing that the Korean crisis might possibly lead into World War III. And he was quite justifiably afraid that he might swing over from alarm into thick-skinned indifference.1

1 “The great effort I [must] make is to realize that this fighting is actually taking place, that people are being killed, that the fighting may spread into a general war . . . even that Los Angeles and other cities may be bombed––perhaps with atom bombs. It is very hard to realize the horror of all this––precisely because I have already spent most of one war right here in this city and so the prospect seems deceptively familiar and scarcely more than depressing. The danger of taking the war unseriously is a truly hideous spiritual danger. If I give way to it, I shall relapse into the smugness of the middle aged, who have nothing much to fear because they won’t be drafted, or the animal imbecility of queens who look forward to an increase in the number of sailors around town.

“To see Jo and Ben Masselink this morning. Both are worried. . . . Told Ben how much I liked his travel-book manuscript, which delighted Jo; she ¾ 1950 ¾

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Then there was the threat to Christopher’s younger friends. It seemed unlikely that Caskey would be drafted, because of his “blue discharge” from the navy (see page 43). Jim Charlton, Ben Masselink and Bob Craft were veterans, so they wouldn’t be called immediately. (As it turned out, none of them were ever called. Indeed, I can only remember one person Christopher had previously known who took part in the Korean War, and he had to do so because he was an air force reserve officer and an experienced World War II pilot––Brad Saunders, see page 172.)

A publisher named Bill Kennedy had come into town from New

York on June 27. Christopher and Caskey already knew him––

maybe through Eileen Garrett the medium. They picked him up at the airport. Mrs. Garrett, whom Christopher knew through the

Huxleys, had control of the magazine Tomorrow and Kennedy, I believe, was helping her reorganize it. Tomorrow had previously been devoted to psychic matters only; now it was to include short stories, assorted articles and reviews. Kennedy was urging Christopher to review books for the magazine and offering what then seemed

generous terms––four hundred dollars per review. Christopher was definitely interested, for he was feeling hard up. So he was ready to be pleasant to Kennedy, whom he would otherwise have avoided.

Kennedy was well-meaning but irritating and a bit of a murderee.

On June 28, Caskey and Christopher took him to dine at the Holiday House, a restaurant up the coast above Malibu, romantically situated with a view over the ocean, which Christopher sometimes used for seduction suppers. Here Caskey and Christopher got drunk––

Kennedy was on the wagon––and Caskey (to quote the journal)

“denounced Kennedy for belonging to the entrepreneur class,

staying at the Miramar, etc.” On June 30, Christopher took Kennedy for a drive, to patch things up.

Long talk about Billy’s accusations. Kennedy had been much hurt, had even considered leaving this morning. He is full of guilt and embraced me several times. In this time of anxiety, one sees how motherly she is. Her Baby may be taken away from her. And this is really heartbreaking, because they so deserve to be happy. They have built up such a charming, yet modest life together. Jo is so industrious, and clever, making swimming suits for her customers. Ben works so hard at his writing. They are gay and bright-eyed and grateful for every instant of pleasure, and yet they demand so little in order to enjoy it.

“With their example, I ought to be unfailingly kind and thoughtful in my dealings with Billy (Caskey). How can I ever be otherwise? Especially at a time like this.” [D 1, pp. 423–4.]

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self-depreciation (sic) and takes us all far too seriously. Billy doesn’t like him. I don’t feel much either way. But his proposals for me to work on the magazine Tomorrow may open a way out of this whole movie mess into a more serious literary life.

The June 30 journal entry also describes a performance given by the Peruvian singer and dancer, Yma Sumac, at Salka Viertel’s house.

It had been arranged as a sort of informal audition, to expose Sumac’s talents to Hollywood. Charlie and Oona Chaplin, John Huston, Iris Tree (“in a converted sari”), John Houseman, Hedy Lamarr, Ella Winter, Friedrich Ledebur with “a bored tennis-playing maharajah”

and Ivan Moffat (“poker-faced, appalled by all the imitations he would have to give”) were among those present. Christopher

describes the performance carefully.1 He is playing one of his literary tricks on himself––using his declared “private State of Emergency”

to make himself write in his journal, not only about the war but about anything that appeals to him.

On July 2, Christopher had supper with Peter Darms.[*] Peter was a young man he had met on the beach, two or three months

previously. Christopher had been running, and when he passed the ruin of the wooden breakwater, Peter had been sitting on top of it, swinging his strong handsome legs. He was a big boy with thick blond hair, darkly suntanned. He had made some remark and

Christopher had been only too willing to stop and talk to him; he had an attractively scowling good-natured face. Christopher was surprised and delighted when the young man made a shamelessly direct pass at him, rubbing his thigh against Christopher’s. They had lain down together in a sheltered place and rubbed off against each other.

Christopher hadn’t seen him since then.

Luckily, he had remembered the young man’s name and

recognized it when he heard it repeated by Paul Fox, who had been going to bed with Peter Darms. Fox wasn’t particularly interested in the affair and he willingly gave Christopher Darms’s phone number.

When Christopher called, Darms didn’t seem surprised. He accepted Christopher’s invitation to dinner and Christopher took it for 1 “The slant-eyed Yma and her cousin, balancing so lightly on their little feet, and uttering sudden wails of mimic despair. And the boy behind them, very close, and thrusting forward with his guitar; so that they seemed to be continually advancing upon us with the compactness and drive of a little military formation. . . . The dances had an airy uncanny birdlike authority: you got the feeling of the uncanny jungle and the discontinuous, abrupt movements of the birds. . . .” [D 1, p. 425]

[* Not his real name.]

¾ 1950 ¾

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granted that Darms remembered who he was. They met, ate, got

along well and ended the evening in bed. When sex was satisfactorily completed, Peter Darms began to laugh. “My God,” he said, “I’ve just realized who you are––how we first met! I’ve been trying to figure it out all evening!”

Peter and Christopher had sex many times after this––Christopher always fucked him. Thus they formed a pleasant uncomplicated

friendship. Later, when Peter found himself a steady, serious lover, Christopher complimented the lover in the words of Lady

Windermere to Lord Augustus: “[Y]ou’re marrying a very good

woman!”[*]

On July 8, Caskey and Christopher drove to Sequoia and back

with Igor and Vera Stravinsky and Bob Craft. The trip is described in a journal entry next day.1 (Christopher had already failed in his resolve to keep a day-to-day record of the Korean crisis and this was to be his last entry that month.) The only reference to Korea is that Bob Craft is said to be worried about being drafted and that

Stravinsky is quoted as saying that he doesn’t expect World War III, only an indefinitely prolonged border struggle between the two empires.

On the drive to Sequoia, as they were crossing the San Fernando Valley, Igor asked them all to excuse him: “I have to think about my opera for ten minutes.” So everybody kept quiet. While Igor

meditated on The Rake’s Progress, Christopher meditated on his novel. And, just as he had often found it helpful to meditate in the 1 Shortly before they entered the Sequoia park, Christopher told Igor––who had never been there before––that he would find the landscape strangely out of perspective, because at first you are surrounded by very small trees, birches, while at the same time you look up and see the giant trees on the skyline, thousands of feet above you. Igor seemed to understand what Christopher meant. He answered promptly: “Just like Shostakovich at the Hollywood Bowl.”

Later they visited the General Sherman Tree, which is supposed to be the largest living thing on earth—274 feet tall, 101 feet around at the base, and between three and four thousand years old. When Igor stood looking up at it, Christopher didn’t feel that it made him seem smaller, as it does most people. This was a confrontation of two great stars. Igor said of the tree: “That’s very serious.”

Igor, then sixty-eight, still had a trim well-coordinated figure. At that time, he was exercising every day. He showed a lot of energy, walking about, scrambling over rocks. He had a huge appetite and complained because they weren’t able to get a meal exactly when he wanted one.

While they were looking at the view of Mount Whitney from Moro Rock, Igor said that Derain had told him that a mountain is the most difficult of all objects to paint.

[* Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, act four.]

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presence of his spiritual guru, Swami, so now the presence of this artistic guru, Igor––not his guru but certainly a very great one––

apparently inspired him. He had several insights which he records on July 9 in the large thin notebook.[1] This is the only occasion in my life on which I have deliberately practiced “artistic meditation.”

On July 9, Christopher had lunch with the Beesleys. I have

said little about them in this diary because their meetings with Christopher don’t usually “make news.” But they were one of

Christopher’s most important contacts throughout this period.

Dodie was indeed the only person within the area of his daily life who had the authority to encourage him to keep on writing––in the sense that Swami had the authority to encourage him to keep on meditating and making japam. Christopher didn’t greatly admire Dodie’s work but that was unimportant. She was a real writer, a professional; therefore she had the authority––every bit as much as if she had been Henry James. And she was an excellent critic––even of work which wasn’t at all to her taste. Christopher discussed his novel with her whenever they met. (It wasn’t merely Christopher’s egotism which prevented them from also discussing Dodie’s writing-in-progress. Dodie was always superstitiously secretive about it.) An 1 Briefly put, these insights were all about the character of Stephen.

Christopher decided––for the first time, I believe––that Stephen should be bisexual. (“The degree to which this notion scares me only proves that I’m on the right track.”) Stephen has revolted from Quakerism as a young man but hasn’t escaped from the puritanism which goes with it––so his occasional homosexual affairs have been guilty. Because he feels guilty, he has behaved irresponsibly toward his male lovers. Then he takes refuge in marriage to Elizabeth Rydal. But she can’t satisfy him sexually. After her death, he marries Jane, who can. But Jane herself is promiscuous, and Stephen finds that he is jealous both of her lovers and of her. And Jane sometimes (as in the scene at the Hollywood party) deliberately takes a boy because she knows Stephen is attracted to him.

Then, at the hostel, Stephen has his first serious homosexual relationship. He falls in love with the doctor, Charles Kennedy. It is Charles who makes the first advances, forcing Stephen to admit to his homosexuality.

Stephen’s bisexuality “––i.e., flirting because one can’t make up one’s mind

––has to be exposed spiritually, economically, politically, socially, as well as sexually. Stephen has to find adjustment on all levels before the book ends.”

“Stephen’s conflict: he can’t subscribe to Quaker mysticism or Quaker pacifism because he hates Quaker puritanism. And yet he is by nature a mystic and a pacifist. . . . If Stephen’s ‘conversion’ means anything, it means that he can accept an apparent paradox––i.e., he still believes in God––or more than ever believes in God––while doing something the God-mongers condemn

––that is, loving another man.”

¾ 1950 ¾

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entry in the large thin notebook (on July 11) refers to this particular meeting. It begins: “Dodie was quite right when we talked this over on Sunday. I am starting at the wrong place. . . .”1

On July 10, Christopher was visited by Anaïs Nin and her very handsome and much younger husband––or lover, they may not have gotten married till later––Rupert Pole. I don’t remember anything about this meeting. I’m nearly sure it was Christopher’s first with Anaïs. Maybe he had met Rupert before––because I have the

impression that Rupert later claimed that Christopher had made a pass at him, which irritated Christopher greatly. (Christopher didn’t like to think of himself as a maker of hopeless passes; it was something that senile queens did.)

What I do know is that Anaïs had sometime previously sent

Christopher a copy of her novel Children of the Albatross, inscribed:

“Our mutual friend Bill Kennedy tried to have us meet but you were not home. This is a preface to a future meeting. Anaïs.” Christopher had read the novel and been seriously impressed. Nevertheless, he had laid it on far too thick in his note of thanks, telling Anaïs that she had made him feel, as never before, what it is like to be a woman

––and adding, “Since one could hardly say more than this to Flaubert about Bovary, I conclude that your novel also is a masterpiece.”

Anaïs, being regally accustomed to courtly language from her

admirers, took this tribute quite as a matter of course.

On July 13, the day-to-day diary notes that Christopher went to the Huntington Hartford Foundation for tea. I think that Frank 1 Dodie’s suggestion was that the novel should start with the scene at the Hollywood party and the discovery of Jane and her lover fucking in the doll’s house. So Stephen leaves for Sarah’s home, where he finds Gerda but no other refugees. He tells Gerda about Jane and she laughs, making Stephen see the funny side of the situation. Then the Traubes arrive and Dr. Kennedy comes to attend Miss Traube, who is very sick. The first time Charles Kennedy is alone with Stephen, he refers to a character in The World in the Evening. The character is female but is actually a portrait of Stephen himself––this was Elizabeth’s way of hinting to Stephen that she knew about his homosexuality.

Stephen has long since realized this, and now Kennedy has guessed it. He is flirting with Stephen by asking him about this character. It is Gerda who finally tells Stephen (after he has been to bed with her––they get drunk to celebrate the news that her husband Peter has escaped from the Nazis) that he, Stephen, is in love with Charles Kennedy. So then Stephen goes to Charles and tells him.

And, after that, they get together.

There is another big entry in the notebook on July 12, which is a rough short draft of the first chapter, not too unlike the chapter which finally appeared in the printed book. On August 9, there is a redrafting of the opening paragraphs.

Then no more entries in 1950. But Christopher evidently went on working during the fall.

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Taylor was probably with him. Frank did go with him to see the Hartfords on July 19 at their house in Hollywood––this is recorded in the day-to-day diary––and the reason for their visit was that Frank was urging Christopher to become one of the trustees of the

foundation. My impression is that Frank himself had already become a trustee and no doubt he wanted to control the board through his nominees. Although Frank was for the time being a film producer at MGM, he still kept up his connection with the New York publishing world, and it is advantageous for a publisher to be in a position to promote literary fellowships for his authors. Hartford was full of conservative artistic opinions but fundamentally lazy and gullible; an operator like Frank could manage him easily and charmingly, without ever having to get tough. As for Christopher, he was

intrigued by the idea of becoming a trustee. This was a new role for him, and the foundation, as he increasingly discovered, could be an ideal place of escape from his homelife with Caskey.

It was a ranch house surrounded by a good deal of land, near the end of a dirt road which straggled along part of Rustic Canyon, north of Sunset Boulevard. The canyon was very hot in summer and an obvious firetrap, but it had the charm of sleepy old-Californian remoteness, although it was so near suburbia; and Hartford had fixed up the swimming pool and had several attractive cottages built in the surrounding woods, all ready to be filled with writers, artists and composers.

On July 15––Caskey having gone off to Laguna Beach with

Lennie Newman––Christopher drove up to the top of Mount

Wilson with Peter Darms. On the way back, they stopped at the Clear Creek Forest Station, where Rupert Pole was living and

working as a forest ranger. Anaïs was staying there with him––in defiance of the regulations, since no wives or girlfriends were permitted and there was no accommodation for them. Anaïs and