Lost Years (28 page)

The
Queen Elizabeth
was much in the news, for she had run aground on a shifting sandbank called the Brambles, as she entered Southampton Water on her previous inbound voyage. Her passengers had been disembarked in launches and she had been towed off, which had delayed this sailing for several days. John Lehmann had jokingly said that this was yet another symptom of the collapse of the British Empire. When she sailed next morning (April 19) everybody was on deck to watch her crawling progress through the danger area. As she grazed the sandbank, the water turned brown; but she didn't stick.

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

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

When they parted in New York,
³⁰
John told Christopher that he was “a very wholesome person.” I think John was inclined to be something of a closet queen. When he called Christopher “wholesome” he was envying Christopher's relative freedom from sexual inhibitions.

Caskey was waiting for Christopher on the dock with their car (he had driven it from California to New York). Christopher was delighted to discover how attractive Caskey was to him, after their three months' separation. He felt himself falling in love, all over again. As for Caskey, he appeared to be equally delighted, though in his own very different style. He was at his most sophisticated—urban, well dressed, well groomed, demure, sparkling, flippantly sentimental. His eyes were bright with flattering Irish glances; but the only compliment he paid Christopher was half in joke—he said that Christopher's hair “looked quite glamorous.” Then he went on to speak of the charming sailor he had spent the previous night with. Christopher promptly began to brag about the sexiness of John Holmes. Caskey smiled and seemed subtly amused. As they drove off the dock, he pulled the car into a sheltered parking place, threw his arms around Christopher and kissed him.

Caskey had been staying at the Park Central Hotel and had moved from a single to a double room so that Christopher could spend the night there. (Caskey had already had a run-in with the house detective because of the late-remaining guests he had entertained in his single.)

That evening, Caskey and Christopher went to see Ingrid Bergman in
Joan of Lorraine
, which must have been a ghastly play, though I think they were both dazzled into grudging acceptance of it by Bergman's beauty and stage presence. They also had a meeting with James and Tania Stern. The Sterns were leaving for Europe the next day and Caskey and Christopher were taking over their apartment for the summer. (Christopher later discovered that Auden was shocked because the Sterns were charging Christopher a rent far in excess of what they themselves were paying for it—I have forgotten how much this actually was. Jimmy Stern was just being Jewish, of course, but Christopher couldn't say this to Auden in front of Chester Kallman.)

On April 26, Caskey and Christopher spent their first night in the apartment, at 207 East 52nd Street. I don't think they went to bed until after dawn; it was a long sexless night of drinking and dialogue
—slow drinking and even slower dialogue. It remains vaguely but powerfully in my mind as being a high point in their relationship. The dialogue was about their feelings for each other; that much I'm sure of. But I can't remember a single line of it. This was quite unlike their normal drunken confrontations (
see here
). What made it memorable was that neither one of them was harboring a grudge against the other at that particular moment—for the obvious reason that they had been apart for so long. And, on the positive side, I think both of them were pleased and surprised and rather proud that their relationship remained as good as new. Caskey was at heart a pessimist, with a low opinion of himself—I realize that nowadays much more clearly than Christopher did at the time. Therefore Caskey had probably been expecting that Christopher would return from England feeling bored with him and ready to call the whole thing off . . . One thing I do remember: this night of drinking didn't result in either Caskey or Christopher becoming really drunk or getting a hangover. Which in itself seems to prove that its psychological climate was more bracing than usual.

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

It was during their stay in New York that the “nanny” aspect of their relationship (
see here
) began to emerge. Christopher's excuse for letting Caskey drive was that New York City was Caskey's town, not his—for it had been the scene of Caskey's life before he went into the navy. But, in fact, Christopher wanted to relax and surrender his will (in all matters that weren't important to him) to a nanny figure who would wait on him and relieve him from the tension of making decisions. (He reserved the right to sulk and passively resist, just as a child does, when Nanny's decisions didn't suit him.)

The apartment itself was snug and well furnished; it seemed much more of a home for them than their two earlier habitations. And Caskey, as before, was prepared to make it as comfortable as possible, and to cook for and entertain their friends. Caskey had a great many
friends in New York and Christopher had Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, Auden, Berthold Viertel, Tony Bower and others. Nearly all their evenings were social.

On May 1, Christopher had lunch with Bennett Cerf. This must have been to discuss Christopher's plan to go to South America with Caskey and write a travel book about their journey, illustrated by Caskey's photographs. (Promoting Caskey's career as a photographer was Christopher's chief reason
³²
for wanting to make the trip; he always dreaded embarking on any travel and only really enjoyed it in retrospect.) Since they now had the money from
Judgement Day in Pittsburgh,
they could easily afford the travelling expenses, even without the advances on royalties they would get from Random House and from Methuen.

The lunch with Cerf must have included a visit to the Random House offices, because I have two vivid memories of that meeting which don't fit into a restaurant. One is of Cerf seated complacently behind his desk, with his yessing assistants around him. They are discussing a possible title for the book. Suddenly Cerf—that incomparable ass—gets an inspiration; he becomes a Jewish prophet passing the word down from God: “The
High
” Andes! That's what we'll call it—“The
High
” (a slight but deeply reverent pause) “
Andes
!!” (Christopher never for one instant considered using this, of course.)

The other memory is of being introduced to Truman Capote. (Even at this prepublication stage of Truman's career, it had to be that way around; one couldn't imagine Truman being introduced to oneself) Christopher was prepared for the honor by one of the Random House partners, who assured him that this young man, whose first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, was soon to appear, could only be compared to Proust. And then the marvellously gracious little baby personage itself appeared; Truman sailed into the room with his right hand extended, palm downward, as if he expected Christopher to kiss it. Christopher didn't, but, within a few moments, he was quite ready to—having been almost instantaneously conquered by the campy Capote charm. To hell with Proust; here was something infinitely rarer and more amusing, a live Ronald Firbank character! Christopher came home and raved about him to
Caskey. And when Caskey himself met Truman (on May 21) he wasn't at all disappointed. There and then, they accepted Truman's invitation to come and stay with him and his friend, Newton Arvin, on Nantucket in July.

On May 5, Christopher joined a gymnasium which was run by an old German named Pilates. It was somewhere over on the West Side, maybe Seventh Avenue.
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I think that Caskey had recommended it and that Caskey himself had gone to it at one time, but he didn't rejoin with Christopher. Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. “Look at him!” Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, “That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he's done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!” Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. “That's not fat,” he declared, punching himself in the stomach, “that's good healthy meat!” He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks.
³⁴

Pilates was an excellent teacher, however, and Christopher learnt a lot from him, even though Christopher gave up going to the gym early in July.
³⁵
I remember only two small pearls of his wisdom. Once, a party of workmen were handling heavy metal objects on the roof of the building opposite. Pilates watched them and commented disgustedly that their posture and movements were all wrong—if only these men knew how, they could transform their boring work into a scientific workout and build themselves marvellous physiques. And once he told Christopher, “If you'll just touch your toes one single time, every day of your life, you'll be all right”—which made Christopher think of a saint begging some hopelessly worldly
householder to please try to remember God for at least one moment during each day.

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

On May 8, Christopher started what he describes as: “
The School of Tragedy
. First draft of a novel.”
³⁶
This fragment—nearly twelve pages of
a large (10½” × 13½”) thin notebook—consists of descriptions of the refugees at the Haverford hostel taken from the 1941–1942 journals and given fictitious names. Its title also comes from the journals. On June 24, 1942, Christopher records that the Schindlers left their room so untidy that Mr. [Josef] Stern remarked severely: “Such people are not fit for the school of tragedy.” Christopher had been delighted by this phrase and had probably been intending to use it for a title, ever since he heard it.

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

These two fragments are written very neatly; they must be fair copies. I remember the little room at the back of the apartment where Christopher's writing was done, and how he had to keep wiping the side of his sweaty hand (the weather was hot and humid) to stop it from smearing dirt over the page. Dirt fell unceasingly all over everything, even when the windows were shut. Christopher hated having dirty hands when he was writing. He hated the heat, too. The filthy city with its noise and its horrible climate soon began to get on his nerves. He couldn't settle down to his novel so he blamed his surroundings and the life he was leading. How could he work in this apartment? He couldn't even create a literary nest for himself by having his books around him; when they arrived by boat from England, late in May, he had to store them in the cellar of the building because the bookshelves in the apartment were crammed with the Sterns' books. And how could he work, he said, when he was surrounded by so many friends and going out to so many parties and drinking so much? Christopher often enjoyed seeing individuals
—parties he never liked unless they were sexy—drinking was his social anesthetic but hangovers were the destruction of his precious private mornings.