Lost Years (34 page)

    When Christopher returned to Germany a few months later, to stay with Auden at Rotehütte, a village in the Harz Mountains, he had arranged beforehand that Berthold should join them there. But Berthold didn't show up. So Christopher made a flying visit to Berlin and found out from the owner of The Cosy Corner that Berthold was wanted by the police for robbery. Christopher returned to Rotehütte, bringing with him a boy he had hastily selected as a substitute sex mate. (I think he must have been helped in this transaction by Francis Turville-Petre (“Ambrose” [in
Down There on a Visit
]), for at that time he spoke very little German.) The next day, the police appeared at the village inn where Auden, Auden's boyfriend, Christopher and the boy he had brought from Berlin were staying. The police were looking for Berthold—no doubt they had been tipped off by someone at The Cosy Corner that they might find him with Christopher. Not wanting to return empty-handed, they cross-examined the two young Germans and thus found out that Auden's friend Otto [Küsel]—a charming boy who used to wrestle naked with him in a field near the village, to the amusement of the villagers [and about whom Auden wrote two poems, “Upon this line between adventure” and “Sentries against inner and outer”]—was an escapee from reform school. So they took him away with them, under arrest; which caused Christopher's boy to decide that Christopher was dangerous to know and that he wanted to be sent back to Berlin immediately.

    This was Christopher's first experience as an honorary member of the criminal class. And it was made more thrilling by a coincidence: while the police were still in the house, the mailman arrived with a letter from Berthold. Christopher read it under their very noses. Berthold wrote that he was in Amsterdam and hoped that Christopher would send him some money. Being now eager to play a part in The Szczesny Saga, Christopher proposed to Auden that they should go at once to Amsterdam. Auden agreed, though he wasn't feeling very kindly toward Berthold, who had been responsible for disrupting his life at Rotehiitte and getting his boyfriend into trouble. (Nevertheless, Auden made his own important contribution to The Szczesny Saga; his poem “Before this loved one . . .” refers to Berthold.)

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

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

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

    Then, in the mid-thirties, after the Nazis had come into power, Berthold started appearing briefly in London. He was working on a freighter (either Dutch or Belgian) which plied between London and some North Sea ports. Berthold told Christopher and his friends that they were smuggling refugees into England. They brought only one refugee at a time, and they docked far up the river at a dock which wasn't carefully patrolled. In the evening, after the customs officials had been on board, Berthold and the captain would get their refugee out of his hiding place and walk him on shore and away from the dock as though he were another member of the crew, coming with them to take a look at the town. After that, he was on his own. Sooner or later, I suppose, he would have to give himself up to the British authorities and appeal for asylum.

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

[
⁴⁴
Athene Palace Bucharest: Hitler's “New Order” Comes to Rumania
(1943); Waldeck was a Rumanian journalist settled in the USA from the end of the 1920s. Returning to Europe in wartime, she found that in Bucharest she could intimately observe the Nazi style of establishing power. As she writes in
Athene Palace,
“she had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the victory of an order of which anti-semitism was an integral part” (p. 6). She felt semi-protected by her status as a U.S. citizen, and reveals that she was sometimes duplicitous in order to achieve friendships useful to her journalism. She gave her book an epigraph from Stendhal to protest her underlying integrity: “Shall I be accused of approving these things because I describe them?”]

[
⁴⁵
On Long Island.]

[
⁴⁶
In the Baltic Sea, during the first two weeks of July 1931.]

⁴⁷
The day-to-day diary's list of books read in 1947 includes:
Back,
Henry Green.
The Good Soldier,
Ford Madox Ford.
The Shadow Line,
Joseph Conrad.
Knock on Any Door,
Willard Motley.
The Gallery
, John Home Burns.
Kaputt
, Curzio Malaparte.
Le Livre blanc
, Cocteau. [Attributed to Cocteau who did the preface and illustrations for this anonymous book.]
Williwaw
and
The City and the Pillar,
Gore Vidal.
The Member of the Wedding
and
Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers. The Rock Pool,
Cyril Connolly.
The Stranger
, Albert Camus.
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
Truman Capote.
Manservant and Maidservant
, Ivy Compton-Burnett. (There are a number of others—including some quite distinguished works:
On the Marble Cliffs
by Ernst Juenger,
Dirty Eddie
by Ludwig Bemelmans,
Memoirs of a Midget
by Walter de la Mare,
The Moonlight by Joyce Cary, The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen and
The Thinking Reed
by Rebecca West—about which I can remember absolutely nothing.)

    I remembered nothing about
Back
when I opened it just now (December 6, 1972), and yet I find that it has an ending in Henry's best and most characteristic manner; no one else could have written it.
The Good Soldier
(since reread) has left nothing in my memory but its claim to be “the saddest story I ever heard”—which seems to me absurd and perhaps even deliberately campy; Ford's disingenuousness is part of his charm.
The Shadow Line
is another unmemorable work by a beloved writer; Conrad combines startlingly realistic moments of physical experience (the tropical raindrop falling on his face in the midst of the spooky calm) with the artificiality of a cultured foreigner talking English at a literary tea. Christopher was much moved by
Knock on Any Door
when he read it; this was
his
idea of a sad story. He fell in love with the hero and wrote Willard Motley a fan letter.
The Gallery
has left me with a strong sense of the Italian wartime atmosphere, which is certainly something—but that trashy, traitorous liar Malaparte has left me with a series of myths about the war which still haunt me as though they were great art.
Le Livre blanc
? Christopher had heard about it long before he read it, and was a bit disappointed. Cocteau's love act with the boy through the transparent mirror is the only image which has remained with me. Christopher wrote a blurb for
The City and the Pillar,
but he didn't really like it, even then; he much preferred
Williwaw.
Capote's books have always seemed to me to be mere skillful embroidery, unrelated to himself and therefore lacking in essential interest. Christopher never truly appreciated McCullers until he worked on a screenplay based on
Reflections,
in the sixties. It is, in many ways, like a French novel and owes a lot to Faulkner. But McCullers has something that Faulkner and the French haven't—fun.
The Stranger
is a French novel and nothing but a French novel; one of the classic bogus masterpieces of this century. Christopher had been put onto Compton-Burnett by the Beesleys, who adored her. Christopher admired her then as I admire her now—neither more nor less. It is delightful to visit her in her elegantly, ironically furnished literary mansion; but she never lets you see what's outside it. Christopher had hated
The Rock Pool
when he first read it, in the thirties. Rereading it in 1947 he loved it, and has loved it ever since. His early dislike of it was probably due to left-wing snobbery. He was quite certain that he knew what kind of a book Connolly
ought
to write, and this wasn't it. It wasn't socially conscious—or rather, it didn't deal with the kind of characters you were supposed to be socially conscious about.

THE 1948—1956 JOURNAL
^[
1
]
begins with an entry on April 11, 1948, written on board the
Groix
, the day before they landed at Dakar. It is a pity that Christopher didn't begin earlier and include a description of April 1, the day they spent ashore in Rio as the guests of [some acquaintances]. I still faintly remember the first glimpse of that fantastic coastline—Christopher's delighted incredulity as the harbor mouth and the Sugar Loaf came into view and he said to himself, “It's not true, I don't believe it!” (Five years later, Christopher felt the same thing when he got his first sight of Monument Valley.
²
) [One of the acquaintances] was an obsessive sexualist; he kept a chart showing the number of boys he had sex with each month and how many orgasms he had with each. He and [his companion] were superhosts; after driving Caskey and Christopher all around the city and giving them a magnificent lunch, they brought them back to [his] apartment where an incredibly handsome youth was waiting. I think he was Japanese-Irish-Negro, such blends being fairly common in Rio. Christopher and Caskey had a hasty conference, since it was obvious that good guestmanship required one of them to go to bed with him. Caskey said Christopher
should do it. Left alone with the boy, Christopher was embarrassed at first, chiefly by his fixed though not necessarily hostile scowl and his disinclination to talk even Portuguese (of which Christopher remembered anyhow only a few words). Christopher tried to excite him by sucking, licking and biting but without apparent success—until the boy suddenly turned Christopher over, greased his ass, got an entirely convincing hard-on and fucked him slowly and most satisfactorily.

The journal entries of April 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, and 20 describe the increasing discomforts of the overcrowded ship and Caskey's and Christopher's consequent Francophobia. Caskey was even more emphatic than Christopher about this; his attitude was so evident that the French passengers didn't dare kidnap him, as they did Christopher, to take part in the line-crossing ceremony and get daubed with flour and water and dunked.
^[
3
]
But Caskey nevertheless condescended to go up on the boat deck every night with a French beau. They only kissed, because the Frenchman was so afraid of being caught if they started any serious sex making.

On April 22, they disembarked at Le Havre and went on by train to Paris, where they stayed a week—visiting Denny Fouts, running into Auden and Chester Kallman and also meeting Gore Vidal for the first time, quite by chance. These happenings are pretty well covered in the journal. Relations between Denny and Caskey were adequately polite but tense underneath—I dimly remember a semi-quarrel between Christopher and Denny on their last evening (the 29th); I think it was because Denny had casually suggested that Caskey should take some money and pick up a packet of opium from a “connection” who was waiting outside the restaurant. Christopher found this outrageous and refused to let Caskey go, saying that the police might well be watching the pusher, in which case Caskey would get arrested. If my memory
is
correct, Denny's suggestion was an entirely characteristic act of aggression. (An altogether different but recognizable version of this scene appears in “Paul.”
^[
4
]
!)

This was their last meeting with Denny; he died at the end of that year. Shortly after Christopher had left Paris, Denny sent him one of his sour-sweet little letters, saying, “I hope you and Billy will go on being as happy as you seem to be.” Denny obviously didn't hope it.

Christopher's journal entries don't betray the fact that he found Gore Vidal sexually attractive, and that Gore was flirting with him.
On April 29, Gore asked Christopher to come and have breakfast with him at his hotel. (I don't remember how Gore avoided inviting Caskey but he did, and this was probably one of the causes of the hostility which soon developed between them.) Just as Christopher was walking along the corridor toward Gore's room, its door flew open and a young man ran out, collided with Christopher and dashed past him to the staircase. Gore laughingly explained that there had been a misunderstanding. When Christopher's arrival was announced on the house telephone, Gore had told the young man—with whom he had spent the night—“Mon ami vient.”
^[
5
]
The young man had taken it for granted that the “ami” was an enraged lover, so he had jumped into his clothes and tried to escape. Gore received Christopher sitting in bed in his underclothes. Later, when he got out to go to the bathroom, Christopher saw that he had very sexy legs. They flirted all through breakfast, but neither was about to make the first move, so nothing happened.