[40 Not his real name.]
41 A sequel to Denny’s death was described to Christopher much later—it may be partly untrue: Tony Watson-Gandy was said to have adored Denny and to have done his best to look after him as long as Denny was alive; but Tony refused absolutely to take drugs. However, after Denny’s death, Tony found a hypodermic syringe and some heroin in Denny’s suitcase. In his misery and grief, Tony decided to try it. As a result he became a dope addict. He went back to England and died a few years later.
Tony took Denny’s dog Trotsky back with him. And so that adventurous dog life, which began in a conscientious objectors’ camp in the California mountains, ended in one of the stately homes of England.
42 Part three, chapter one.
1949
ON JANUARY 4, Christopher’s books arrived from New York.1 All this while, they had been stored in the cellar of 207 East 52nd Street. The Sterns had long since reoccupied their apartment there, and Jimmy Stern had written Christopher a letter telling him that the cellar had somehow been flooded and that he was afraid some of Christopher’s books were damaged. So Christopher was prepared for a shock, but not sufficiently. When he saw several of his especially beloved volumes stained and crinkled and cracked, he shed tears. Later he got a few of them rebound, but this seemed to destroy their identity.
On January 6, Christopher went back to MGM for additional work on The Great Sinner and stayed there till January 13. During this week, he saw a rough cut of the whole film. I don’t remember what work he did—some of it may have been on passages of narration, in which “Fedor” is presumably quoting from the novel he has just written about the experiences shown on the screen.
On January 14, Jay Laval and Brad Saurin left for the Virgin Islands. Jay had been hired to organize and open a chic restaurant there and he took Brad along as his assistant. Meanwhile, Jay’s restaurant in the Canyon stayed open, with Lennie Newman doing most of the cooking. I believe the Virgin Islands restaurant was a success; but Jay’s association with Brad wasn’t. They quarrelled, and their affair was over by the time they returned to California.
On January 25, Christopher was called back again to MGM. He worked there for three days.
On January 29, he finished chapter seven of The Condor and the Cows.
On February 4, he worked at MGM for one day only. I think this may have been a day on which they were recording the narration passages. These, of course, had to be spoken by Gregory Peck. But there was one scene which required a different male actor’s voice over the shot. Fedor, down and out, goes into a church to pray. Then be becomes aware of the sound of coins being dropped into the poor box. He is tempted to steal from it and is just about to do so when he thinks he hears a voice, coming from the carved figure on a nearby crucifix. It shames him, and he withdraws his hand from the box.
This voice was to have been Frank Morgan’s; he had played a part in the film—Pitard, a ruined gambler who shoots himself and later appears to Fedor as a ghost—but Morgan didn’t show up that day because he was sick. (He was to die a few months later.) Since Christopher happened to be in the recording studio and this was an emergency, someone (maybe Gottfried) suggested that he should speak the lines. And so, more or less in a spirit of fun, Christopher took on the role of Christ at five minutes’ notice.
In order that his voice should reverberate spookily, they made him stand in a small concrete passageway which led to one of the exits. He was given a hand mike at the end of a long cable, like an announcer. Since he couldn’t see into the studio and watch the screen on which his scene was being projected, they rigged up a signal light to let him know when to begin. Whenever the light went on, he was to speak his lines—until they got the reading they wanted.
For some reason, the keep-out sign outside the exit door hadn’t been switched on, so Christopher was in constant danger of interruption. Once, just as his signal light flashed, the exit door opened and a young carpenter came in. There was no time for explanations. Christopher fixed the carpenter with an authoritative glare and told him accusingly: “And they divided my garments among them—and they cast dice for my robe.” When telling this story later, Christopher used to say the young man looked panic-stricken, fearing that he was confronted by a religious maniac. I doubt this. What does strike me now, as I write it down, is—how beautifully suitable it was that the young man should have been a carpenter!
On February 12, Christopher finished chapter eight.
On February 21, he went to the Good Samaritan Hospital, to watch Bill Kiskadden operate. Christopher’s relations with Bill had always been somewhat strained. He sensed (and was later told definitely by other people) that Bill didn’t like him. I think Bill was even physically repelled by Christopher, finding him creepy, unnatural, a faggot. But Bill and Christopher had to keep on polite terms with each other as long as Christopher went on seeing Peggy. They both worked quite hard at this, and they found a topic for communication in Christopher’s amateur interest in medicine. So Bill invited Christopher to come and see him at work. It was a challenge maybe, from Bill’s point of view; he may have thought that Christopher would either back out or turn squeamish and have to leave the operating room. Christopher had no such qualms. Having seen a leg amputated, an abdomen slit open and a skull trephined, he was convinced that no surgical sight could upset him.
But there is something uncomfortably personal about plastic surgery on the face; it is only too easy to identify with the patient. So Christopher did feel squeamish two or three times that morning, though he didn’t give Bill satisfaction by showing it.
The patient was a truck driver—Bill Kiskadden didn’t as a rule do cosmetic operations; he repaired the victims of industrial accidents and car wrecks. This man had been driving his truck somewhere up in the mountains when an emergency arose which forced him to choose between colliding with a small car full of people and swinging his truck off the road into a steep slope. He swung off the road and the truck turned over and his face was smashed against the steering wheel. Now Bill Kiskadden was working to get his nose back into its proper position; it had been knocked crooked. The patient was completely conscious. Christopher felt a qualm as Bill took a hypodermic and very slowly and deliberately sank its needle into the tip of the truck driver’s nose. The truck driver uttered a groan and exclaimed that it hurt. “I know it hurts,” Bill told him, “it hurts like hell. That’s what you get for being a brave man.” Bill said this in a nice friendly doctor-to-patient tone—and yet there was something about the look on his face which convinced Christopher that what Gerald Heard had always maintained was true: Bill was a sadist.2
At this point there is a group of four more entries in the 1948–1956 journal, on February 20, March 1, March 2 and March 3. They refer to the Ramakrishna birthday puja at the Vedanta Center which Christopher attended and a party he and Caskey went to at Thomas Mann’s house (both on March i). Also (March 2) to Christopher’s difficulties in starting chapter ten of the South American book—he had finished chapter nine on February 24. There is also a reference to Peter Watson who was then in Los Angeles with his friend Norman Fowler; Christopher and Caskey had been seeing a lot of them.
Christopher doesn’t say anything in the day-to-day diary about his work with Swami on Patanjali’s yoga aphorisms—translation and commentary—which was later to be published as How to Know God. However, in the March 2 entry in the journal, he writes: “Swami’s way ahead of me,” which shows that they must have been working together for some time already.
The only really significant feature of these entries is that they twice mention the difficulties Christopher is having with Caskey. This is the first time that Christopher has even admitted in writing that there are any difficulties and his tone suggests that he is trying hard to minimize them. Indeed he presents the whole problem as though it were a mere lack of consideration by Caskey for Christopher’s comfort and convenience. Christopher complains that Caskey stays up, from time to time, playing the record p
layer all night—it seems that this usually happens when they have had a party and Caskey is drunk. Christopher writes:
It is a most curious deadlock—arising, apparently, out of an emotional blind spot in Caskey. He absolutely cannot understand why I mind being kept awake. And I absolutely cannot understand how he can keep me awake, even if he doesn’t understand why. However, I freely admit that I am kept awake by a kind of 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 here) 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 moderation 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 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 Christopher’s guilt was actually embarrassment—it wasn’t that he 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 deeper feelings? When I call Christopher half-assed, I know exactly what I mean. He had, s
o 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 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.
Lost Years Page 31
