Lost Years (42 page)

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, 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
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.
³
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
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,
⁴
and he was rather proud of
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 overhanging 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
.
^[
5
]

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
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,
⁶
Peck henceforth avoided talking to Christopher when
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.