Lost Years (17 page)

    The dean obviously thought Arensberg was crazy. I'm fairly sure Arensberg showed Christopher a letter which the dean had written him, breaking off all further communications—“After the events of last Thursday, there can be no friendly relations between us.” In telling the story, Christopher used to claim that Arensberg had been caught in the act of digging a tunnel under the road between his lodgings and the chapter house; he was trying to get at Bacon's grave. But this was probably just Christopher's imagination.

³⁴
Devotion
was a film about the Brontës, with Ida Lupino as Emily and Arthur Kennedy as Branwell. Christopher was able to see it in the projection room because he was friendly with Keith Winter, who had worked on the script.

³⁵
It may well be that Huxley made some memorable remarks on this historic evening. Perhaps he repeated what he had written to Julian Huxley earlier that same day (see
Letters of Aldous Huxley
): “All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again—and when they [have] succeeded, more or less, his name will be Humpsky Dumpsky and his address, poste restante Moscow.”

³⁶
It was released in 1946, with Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains. Collier got first credit, with Joseph Than. Produced by Henry Blanke, directed by Irving Rapper.

[
³⁷
Hypocrite.]

[
³⁸
Not his real name.]

³⁹
Moor Born
is a play by Dan Totheroh, first performed in New York in 1934. It must have remained a favorite piece for amateur actors all these years, for when I asked about it at the Samuel French library today (January 13, 1972) they recognized the name at once and produced a copy.

 

BRANWELL
: I didn't want to go to my grave unsung . . . obscure . . . a nobody. . . . It's too late now . . . too late for me.

EMILY
: Perhaps not too late. Strange things can happen to you, for you are moor born, Branwell. Yes . . . moor born . . . and what the moors took from you, they may return.

 

⁴⁰
The Woman in White
was finally made and released in 1948, with Henry Blanke credited as its producer. Stephen Morehouse Avery got sole credit as its writer.

⁴¹
Wolfgang wanted to stick close to the Maugham story. His chief deviation from it was to have Rowley plant some clues around the corpse so that the Italian police are tricked into thinking that Karl (called Paul in the script) has been killed by the Gestapo, which makes them hastily drop the case and announce that death was due to heart attack. This was Wolfgang's idea and I think it works very well—culminating in a good cross-purpose comedy scene between the Italian chief of police and the German consul, in which they both deplore the carelessness of the Gestapo's murder methods.

    The code prevented Wolfgang and Christopher from making it clear that Mary and Paul actually have sex together before he shoots himself Rereading the script today, I can't be sure just how much of a disadvantage this would have been, if the film had been made. (It never was.) The scene as Maugham wrote it is more convincing, but not entirely so. It might have got some wrong laughs. And Maugham's dialogue is hardly to be believed—he makes Karl say things like, “You have shown me heaven and now you want to thrust me back to earth”!

    Christopher once summarized the plot to Collier as, “Humped, bumped, and dumped”—referring to the fate of the Karl—Paul character.)

[
⁴²
Not his real name.]

⁴³
According to Garson Kanin (
Remembering Mr. Maugham
), Willie didn't begin work on his screenplay until November. Kanin says that Willie asked Cukor to show him the existing screenplay and was so horrified by it that he offered to write one himself, for free. I am almost sure Kanin is wrong about the date, however.

    (June 24, 1977: Kanin
was
wrong. I have just seen the revised final draft of Maugham's
Razor's Edge
screenplay. It is dated July 25, 1945.)

⁴⁴
When Maugham was about to publish
The Razor's Edge,
in 1944, he had written to Swami for an exact translation of the verse from the Katha Upanishad on which the title of the novel is based. Swami (or maybe Christopher) had replied, explaining carefully that the image of a razor's edge is used to suggest a narrow and painful path (the path to enlightenment) and that therefore one should
not
say, “It is difficult to cross,” as some translators do, but rather, “It is difficult to tread.” Maugham ignored this piece of advice, however. The translation he used in his novel was, “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over,” which is almost as ambiguous as “to cross.”

    I don't remember that I ever saw a copy of Willie's screenplay. It was never used. Cukor left the picture and it was finally directed by Edmund Goulding, with a new script (or perhaps a revised version of the original one) by Lamar Trotti. Christopher, at Swami's suggestion, wrote to Trotti, offering free technical advice on the Indian sequence. Trotti never answered. And when the picture was made the Indian scenes had several mistakes in them. Shri Ganesha's teaching was idiotically distorted.

    Cukor's choice for the role of Larry was a young unknown amateur named John Russell, who had just left the Marine Corps. He was good looking, and Cukor still (June 1972) maintains that the test they shot of him was excellent. Some of the studio executives thought him too tall, however—he was six foot four—and this was one reason why he didn't get the part when the film was taken over by Goulding. John Russell afterwards worked quite a bit in films and in television, but he never really made a hit. Cukor remembers that he met Russell later and that he was drunk and looked terrible.

    Prabhavananda doesn't remember that Cukor ever brought Russell to see him. But Edmund Goulding did bring Russell's successor, Tyrone Power. Swami was, and still is, scornful about Power. He says that he asked Power if he understood what Larry is supposed to believe, and that Power admitted that he didn't. Some versions of the story of their meeting state that Swami said, “Mr. Power, you are not worthy to play Larry!”, but Swami denies that he said this. Seeing Swami must have scared poor Power out of whatever wits he possessed, so it's no wonder he made a bad impression. In the last analysis, Power's lack of understanding was the fault of Trotti and the stupidities of his script.

⁴⁵
I don't remember that Denny and Willie ever got together during this visit; but it seems to me that Denny used to brag that he had been admired by Willie—at any rate from a distance—when he was in Europe before the war. Curiously enough, Denny and Willie were to die on the same day, December 16; Denny in 1948, Maugham in 1965.

[
⁴⁶
The American magazine.]

⁴⁷
The Friendship at this period is described in
A Single Man
as “The Starboard Side.” The sentence about “Girls dashing down from their apartments to drag some gorgeous endangered young drunk to safety and breakfast served next morning in bed . . .” refers to Jo Lathwood's capture of Ben Masselink. Jo was living at her apartment on West Channel Road (“Las Ondas”), only a few doors from The Friendship, throughout this period, but Christopher didn't get to know her until later.

    Peter Viertel writes about The Friendship and its owner, Doc Law, in his first novel
The Canyon.
He calls Doc Law “Doc Winters” and The Friendship “The Schooner Café.” He also mentions the pharmacy which Doc Law ran, right next to the bar. (The wall between them has been broken down now, and the extra space is sometimes used for dancing.)

    Doc Law spent most of the daytime in the pharmacy, drunk. His drugs looked as if they had aged to mere dust in their glass jars. Christopher used to say that one could have gone in there and swallowed spoonfuls from all the jars marked “poison” without coming to the slightest harm. Here are two items about Doc from the notebook [mentioned pp. 14–15, 21, 25] (date unknown):

    Doc Law, on the oil strike in New York: “They're a long way from Christ.” . . . I go to Doc Law to plead for some toilet paper, during the shortage. Doc is in a good mood. He is printing an announcement—something about “a large assortment”—on a long roll of paper, with a rubber stamp and a ruler to keep the letters in line. “Sure,” he answers, “you can wipe your ass with me any time you want to, kid.”

⁴⁸
Christopher didn't trade the Packard in, when he bought the Zephyr. The allowance on it would anyhow have been tiny. Instead, he decided to give it to Hayden Lewis—thereby pleasing and greatly impressing Caskey, as was his intention. This started a tradition, that the Packard must always be given away; to sell it would bring terribly bad luck. And so, during the next few years, the Packard changed owners for free at least half a dozen times. It was a very tough car and lived long.

⁴⁹
Sometime before this, Denny must have had the Picasso (see April 13, 1944 [in
D1
]) crated and removed from his apartment to be shipped east. While he was away in the East—in New York, I think—he sold the Picasso to a private buyer, someone he met at a cocktail party, I believe. Denny was very pleased with himself for having arranged this, and said that the sum of money he got for it was far more than the dealers had offered him. Fact and fiction mingle at this point—I can't now be sure if $9,500, the figure I give in
Down There on a Visit
, is correct or not. Anyhow, the picture was eventually resold for something like $40,000. I think it's now in Chicago, in one of the museums. [It is in New York, in the Museum of Modern Art; see Glossary under Fouts.]

[
⁵⁰
The Malibu Colony, a gated beach community.]

⁵¹
They also went to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo three times during its visit to Los Angeles—on November 30 (the opening night) with Hayden Lewis, on December 4 with John Goodwin and Hayden, on December 7 with Bo and Kelley. Among the stars of that season were Leon Danielian (who danced
L'Après-midi d'un faune
), [Alexandra] Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes, Herbert Bliss. Balanchine's
Ballet Imperial
was on the program.

[
⁵²
Not his real name.]

⁵³
Here are [a] few other books read during 1945—from a list in the 1945 day-to-day diary: Cyril Connolly's
The Unquiet Grave
(a book I have never stopped dipping into, because it contains the essence of Cyril's enthusiasms and lovable faults—his literary snobbery, his rash generalizations based on misinformation, his confessions of angst and ill health, his Francophilia—it is amazing how readable he is, and in an area where nearly everybody else is intolerable). George Moore's
Evelyn Innes
and
Sister Theresa.
(These appealed enormously to Christopher at that time, with his then vivid memories of the horrors of monastic life. I still find the ending of
Sister Theresa
tremendous. About the work as a whole, I'm not so sure that it is the masterpiece I once thought it.) Edmund Wilson's
The Wound and the Bow
(I still find the essay on Dickens very exciting).
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh. (At that time, Christopher found something moving in Waugh's sentimentality and the daringly nauseating phrases he uses, both sexual and religious; they seemed to express a special kind of sincerity. A rereading not long ago rediscovered nothing but the nausea.) Christopher was fascinated by G. N. M. Tyrrell's
Science and Psychical Phenomena
(this tied in with his phase of interest in clairvoyants,
see here
). He was thrilled by Nigel Balchin's
The Small Back Room,
with its harrowing bomb-detonation scene. He also read with interest and admiration James's “Lady Barberina” and “The Author of Beltraffio,” Gide's
Lafcadio's Adventures,
John Collier's
His Monkey Wife
—but they haven't made any lasting impression.

SINCE THERE ISN'T
any day-to-day diary for 1946, I shall have to describe the happenings of that year much more vaguely and impressionistically. But before I get on to that, I'll write something about the early stages of the Caskey-Christopher relationship.

As has been said already, Christopher got involved with Caskey partly because Denny had dared him to do it. A bit later, when Caskey and Christopher were already going together, Christopher got another kind of dare—from Hayden Lewis. Hayden warned Christopher, in his soft-voiced mocking way, that Caskey was “a bad boy,” implying that he didn't think Christopher would be able to handle him. As Caskey's best friend, Hayden could speak with authority; his warning was impressive, even if bitchily intended. Christopher must have known, even in those early days, what Hayden meant by calling Caskey “bad.” But the challenge excited Christopher far more than it deterred him. Caskey's temperament, with all its unpredictability, offered Christopher a new way of life. Part of the polarity between them was that of Irishman
¹
and Englishman.

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