Lost Years (50 page)

³¹
“Certainly, my mind is softening, weakening. I have so little coordination that I putter around like a dotard. . . . Then there is this constant sexual itch, which never seems to be satisfied, or very seldom, because it is accompanied by a certain degree of impotence.” (I'm not sure what Christopher means by this last sentence. As a result of his 1946 operation, Christopher had developed an idiosyncrasy; he could get a more complete orgasm if he pressed his thumb against a nerve at the root of his penis while he was jerking off. But this didn't mean that he couldn't have an orgasm during sex with another person. And if that orgasm wasn't as complete, it could be (obviously) far more satisfactory, psychologically. When Christopher talks about his impotence, he may merely be saying that his compulsive mental “itch” drives him to attempt more sex acts than his body really “wants,” with the consequence that his sex organs refuse to cooperate.)

 

    . . . there is a hyper-tension, worse, I think, than any I have ever experienced.

    And so I fail to write. I put it off and put it off, and I do nothing about getting a job, and I drift toward complete pauperism, with nothing in sight. I am lazy and dreamy and lecherous. . . . And I am fundamentally unserious in my approach to other people. I don't believe in myself or my future, and all my “reputation” is just a delayed-action mechanism, which only impresses the very young.

At the end of this negative verdict—which Christopher, as usual, is evidently making as black as possible in order to cause a counterreaction and thus cheer himself up—Christopher resolves to “keep right on trying and struggling.”

    I can tell that he wasn't really worried, however. Paradoxically, despite his uneasy guilty nature, Christopher had learned to live with himself—indeed, he says as much in this same journal entry: “One of the chief benefits that remain to me from the Ivar Avenue days is that I have learned
not
to be alarmed by any mental symptoms, however violent or odd.” [
D1
, p.419.]

³²
As I remember it, Michael didn't come with Christopher to these parties—either because he had parties of his own to go to or because Christopher feared that it would be embarrassing to bring him. As a homosexual, Christopher had long since made a discovery about his “understanding” heterosexual friends; having once brought themselves to “accept” their queer friend's “official” boyfriend, they are sincerely shocked if he shows up with other boys, even when the boyfriend is out of town. Christopher had sometimes found himself in the ridiculous and humiliating position of explaining the other boy's presence and even apologizing for it—“He's a friend of Billy's,” etc.

³³
On January 2, Christopher made an entry in the journal, headed “Some ideas for stories.” The first of these ideas is the life of the film dog Strongheart—or rather, an improved version of it which that seldom reliable but always magically memorable fabulist Gerald Heard had told to Christopher: “. . . the very mean dog who is trained, given a wonderful disposition, so that it turns into a canine saint and finally dies trying to understand” its master and mutate into a human being.

    The second idea is the story of Denny Fouts and Tony Watson-Gandy (page 173,
note 1
) told from the viewpoint of a fictitious character who is in love with Tony and hates the evil influence of Denny upon him.

    The third idea is obviously suggested by Christopher's relations with Michael Leopold:

A middle-aged, “established” writer and a very young writer, still unpublished. The middle-aged writer is going through a period of complete impotence, but the young one doesn't know this. He is tremendously impressed by the older man and quite overwhelmed when the latter asks him to stay. Every morning, the young man sits down joyfully in the living room, thinking, “We are working under the same roof,” and writes as never before, in a fever of inspiration. Meanwhile, the older man goes up to his study and stays there all day, pretending to work. Does the young man unconsciously “cure” him? Perhaps.

    What strikes me as remarkable here is the speed with which Christopher's creative metabolism has functioned. Barely ten days after their first meeting, Michael has been “assimilated” and transformed into a fiction character. This was the sincerest compliment that Christopher—being Christopher—could possibly have paid him and their relationship. Michael had somehow touched the nerve of Christopher's imagination.

³⁴
The day-to-day diary's list of books Christopher read in 1949 includes:
The Blood of the Martyrs
(Naomi Mitchison),
The Servant
(Robin Maugham),
Concluding
(Henry Green),
The Season of Comfort
(Gore Vidal),
The Narrow Corner
(Maugham),
The Heat of the Day
(Elizabeth Bowen),
The Tower of London
(Ainsworth),
The Ides of March
(Thornton Wilder),
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(Orwell),
Two Worlds and Their Ways
(Compton-Burnett),
A Long Day's Dying
(Frederick Buechner),
Love in a Cold Climate
(Nancy Mitford),
The Oasis
(Mary McCarthy),
Herself Surprised
(Joyce Cary),
The Sheltering Sky
(Paul Bowles),
The Lottery
(Shirley Jackson).

    Christopher had reread
The Narrow Corner
that year because Fred Zinnemann was considering remaking it as a film. (It had already been made in 1933, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) Dipping into it before writing this (August 6, 1973) I feel again what Christopher felt then, that it is Maugham's one really magic novel—by which I suppose I merely mean that it is the novel I would have vaguely yearned for if he
hadn't
written it, the Maugham book which is custom-created for Christopher and his particular fantasies. I love its setting in the Spice Islands, its dreamy languid equatorial atmosphere, its romantic queerness. I love Dr. Saunders (the most sympathetic of all Maugham's doctors) and Ah Kay (the most adorable of his Chinese boys) and Captain Nichols (for being so wonderful at the funeral of the Japanese pearl diver). Erik, with his goodness, is rather a bore, and so is Fred with his sulks and the stilted dialogue Maugham gives him to speak. But the poetic
idea
of Fred, under the curse of his own sex appeal, is terrific. I think this could be an unforgettable film, if it was directed by the right man—not Zinnemann. Zinnemann soon dropped the project.

    
The Tower of London
was another book that Christopher reread that year. It had been one of his childhood favorites and, as far as I remember, it didn't disappoint him at all—he still felt the magic of the Cruikshank illustrations, smelt the smell of the period and was aware of a privately perceived relationship between the Tower of London and Marple Hall. (I think this was created by Ainsworth's narrative technique, which is absurd and yet curiously effective: in the midst of a melodramatic scene, Ainsworth will unexpectedly turn his novel into a guidebook. For example: the Spanish Ambassador, Renard, has been muttering threats against the life of Lady Jane Grey and resolves that Mary shall have the throne. Suddenly he stops to look at the White Tower, and Ainsworth describes it, ending with a couple of sentences which bring us out of the period and right up to the date when they were written: “The round turret, at the north-east angle, was used as an observatory by the celebrated astronomer Flamsteed, in the reign of Charles the Second. The principal entrance was on the north, and was much more spacious than the modern doorway, which occupies its site.” Christopher, during his boyhood at Marple Hall, had guided visitors around and lectured them on the history of the building; he had thus developed a double-image awareness of past and present. So Ainsworth's Victorian guidebook voice didn't seem anachronistic to him. Quite the reverse. In the midst of these long-ago Tudor treasons and head choppings, it was Ainsworth's voice which made history credible, and the rooms of the Tower—even its dungeons and its torture chamber—familiar and almost cozy. . . . Of course it must be added that, although Ainsworth is a painstaking antiquarian, the
tone
of his melodrama is unmistakably nineteenth century, not sixteenth.)

    When I saw
The Ides of March
on the 1949 list, I couldn't remember anything about it, except that it had been Christopher's favorite among the new books he read that year. Now (August 19, 1973), having just finished rereading it, I admire it very much—partly because it is the kind of historical novel I would like to have written, if I were a historical novelist. Wilder is a bit too elegant for my taste, and too arch, and too much of a name-dropper—such a scholarly closet queen. But his method of telling the story through fictitious documents seems to me the best imaginable, when you're dealing with a character as remote from us in time as Caesar is. In fictitious documents, you can stylize dialogue acceptably because the reader isn't being asked to believe that this is
exactly
how the character talked. In direct narrative, the same dialogue would sound hopelessly artificial, because direct narrative makes an implicit claim to be realistic.

    
The Sheltering Sky
was Christopher's first experience of Paul Bowles's writing. He felt that he liked the book—particularly its evocation of North Africa—much better than he liked its author's tone of voice. Bowles has an air of only just barely tolerating the presence of the reader. “Don't stick around on
my
account,” he seems to be saying, “you're going to loathe this place” (indicating the Sahara desert) “and you'll never understand these people” (meaning the Arabs). Christopher felt, and I still feel, that Bowles's arrogance is peculiarly Frog—you could call him an English-speaking French anti-novelist. But, still and all, he's readable and few of the Frogs are.

    Christopher liked
Two Worlds and Their Ways
as much but no more than he had liked
Manservant and Maidservant
. However,
Two Worlds and Their Ways
contains a tremendous passage which Christopher has been quoting ever since he read it: “We think our little failings have their own charm. And they have not. And they are great failings.”
The Blood of the Martyrs
disappointed him. Mitchison was suffering, he thought, from leftist Christianity—which is the dreariest kind of leftism, and of Christianity. . . .
Concluding
disappointed him too: it seemed rather dull. . . . Being almost invariably bored by satire, he wasn't disappointed in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
—merely bored by it. . . .
The Servant
is mere closet-macabre—one of those novels in which queerness is equated with Evil and loss of class status with Degradation. . . . Christopher thought
The Season of Comfort
better than Gore Vidal's earlier novels—excluding
Williwaw
—but that wasn't saying much. . . . In a journal entry of March 2, 1949, Christopher quoted an arty-farty phrase from
The Heat of the Day
, which he hadn't yet finished. “Quite exciting,” he adds, “and some good characters”—but my memory assures me that it was trash. . . . Christopher recommended
A Long Day's Dying
in a blurb. I can't remember why. I have never been able to get through any other book by its author; when you open them, moths fly out. . . . As for the other books on the list (by Mitford, McCarthy, Cary and Jackson) Christopher found them charming, entertaining, clever and altogether worthy of praise—by
The New Yorker
. They weren't, any of them, his dish.

ON JANUARY 1,
Bill Harris arrived to stay with Christopher. He had come from New York to California to visit his mother, who was living in La Jolla. Bill was greatly excited about Jack Fontan, his new lover. Jack had a small but prominent part in
South Pacific,
which had opened in New York the previous April. The character Jack played was called Staff Sergeant Thomas Hassinger on the program, but he was already known to hundreds of queers as “The Naked Sailor.” Wearing nothing but a pair of the shortest shorts, without underwear, Jack sprawled in the midst of the group which sang “What ain't we got? We ain't got dames”—displaying nearly all of his large and magnificent body, including glimpses of his genitals. Bill had a reclining photograph of him stark naked; it had had to be shot in three separate sections because of Jack's great length. Bill proudly displayed it on a shelf in the bedroom where he slept during his visit.

Bill Harris and Jack Fontan had met each other in the late fall and
Bill had immediately moved in with Jack, who was living in an abandoned synagogue. When the cold weather began, their waterpipes froze. Bill had to fetch water in pails from a shop below—he spoke of himself as being “like Rebecca at the well.” The cold was so intense that they couldn't get warm even when holding each other in bed. Bill and Jack tried to remedy this by lifting the bed onto two chests of drawers—one at each end—over the gas oven, but, when they climbed into bed, the bed broke in half Since they couldn't use the toilet, they had to shit into newspapers and then leave their shit packages outside on the windowsill until they froze solid and could be carried downstairs and left in a trash can. . . . Bill described these hardships to Christopher with the sentimental relish of an infatuated lover.

(To return to the subject of Jack Fontan's shorts in
South Pacific
, Jack tells me—August 4, 1973—that, when rehearsals started, the minor characters were given a pile of military garments and told to pick out the ones that fitted them. So Jack got himself a navy work-shirt, pants and a pair of shoes. When Joshua Logan, the director, arrived to inspect the costumes, he promptly ordered Jack to take off his shirt and his shoes. He then called for a pair of scissors and snipped
away the legs of Jack's pants, just above the knee. This didn't satisfy him, however. He kept snipping higher and higher, until Jack's legs were left bare right up to the crotch. Logan then decided that Jack could put the shoes on again.