Lost Years (21 page)

Christopher found the work absorbing because it was, in fact, a review of his life in America and an apology for his actions and the decisions he had made during those six years—his involvement with Vedanta and the movies and pacifism, his decision not to return to England, his work with the Quakers, his move to the Vedanta Center and his decision to leave it. The apologetic parts of the journals embarrass me now, but Christopher certainly got some important insights in the process of writing them. And the journals as a whole have been an invaluable quarry of material for books I
have written since then. It was always Christopher's intention that they should be read by at least a few other people, so his sexual memories are almost entirely censored. I am filling in some of those blank spaces as I write this book.
¹⁹

This period at Salka's garage apartment now seems to me to have been the happiest in Christopher's whole relationship with Caskey—I mean, the happiest for Christopher. Caskey may well have felt
inhibited there, because he loved entertaining and cooking. But Caskey was busy, too. There was a second, downstair bathroom in the garage building, attached to a room which Peter Viertel had used as a “den.” Salka let Caskey have this bathroom for his darkroom. Caskey was taking a lot of photographs, including pictures in Venice, Ocean Park and waterfront Santa Monica which were to be illustrations in a book which Christopher and he were planning to do about The Beach. (This book never got finished—bits of its narrative appeared in a magazine article by Christopher called “California Story”—later, “The Shore”—but with pictures by Sanford Roth, much inferior to Caskey's.
²⁰
)

Christopher must have visited The High Valley Theatre sometime this year. He wrote an article about it which was published in
Theatre Arts
, June 1947.
^[
21
]
The theater was in the Upper Ojai Valley and was run by Iris Tree and Alan Harkness. Here are some notes which Christopher must have taken during his visit—of dialogue between the teacher (either Alan Harkness or Ronald Bennett) and his student actors during a class in “the improvisation of psychological gesture”:

TEACHER
: Let's have something of a fight. Not physical.

A STUDENT
: Something from
Noah?
^[
22
]

TEACHER
: Not as outward as that. . . . Yes, and just one other condition—that the woman is separate. . . . Leave the face free. Do it more through the quality through you. . . . Even for the style, the fists are a little too obvious. Let's go away and come together—

A STUDENT
: I haven't felt so static since 1943.

TEACHER
: Now full tragic style—form a group around the center, with the quality of despair. . . . Now change it to clown style. . . . Now a fairy tale—once-upon-a-time style. A wonderful little creature is beginning to take shape, right before your eyes. . . . (
To a student
) Now, you be like Cornwall in
Lear,
who very darkly, thickly opposes. No, don't
act
it. Yours is a warm powerful will. (
To another student
) Yours is thinner, but somehow withdrawing from it.

Caskey and Christopher both tended to be promiscuous sexually, but this didn't, as a rule, upset the balance of their relationship. Their only problems were that they had one car between the two of them and that, if one of them wanted to use the garage apartment for sex, the other had to clear out. This could generally be arranged without inconvenience.

Christopher was much more prone to jealousy than Caskey was, but Caskey's sex mates were usually casual pickups and he was always tactful when speaking of them to Christopher; he never made them seem important. As far as I can remember, Christopher only got seriously jealous once, during this period—and even then he had to admit that Caskey was behaving as well as he possibly could, under the circumstances. This was when a sailor named Jack Keohane
^[
23
]
showed up unexpectedly from Long Beach, on shore leave. Jack Keohane and Caskey had been in the navy together in Florida and had had a passionate affair. (Hayden Lewis told Christopher with teasing bitchiness how, when he came home from his own job there, hungry for supper, he would find Caskey and Keohane in bed together already, and how they would make love all evening till they fell asleep, without eating anything at all.) What had made Keohane extra desirable in Caskey's eyes was that he had then only just “come out”; Caskey was his first male lover. He could therefore be classified 1A, a Real Man, and, by definition, hopelessly Christopher's sexual superior. And The Past now gave him added glamor; he was like The Stranger in [Ibsen's]
The Lady from the Sea
.

There is no doubt that Caskey was deeply stirred, at first, by Keohane's reappearance. They went off together to a steambath downtown, after an evening of drinking. Later, there were trips down to Long Beach to visit Keohane there. Once or twice, Christopher went along and tried to behave well, on the lines of “any friend of Billy's is a friend of mine . . .” but, when alone again with Caskey, he sulked. Caskey took Christopher's jealousy as something tiresome but neutral, he didn't attempt to reassure Christopher; he was frankly under Keohane's spell and made no secret of the fact that they were having sex together. Keohane himself was pleasant to Christopher but not particularly friendly; he seemed unaware of the situation which his presence created. He was a slim, well-built young man, a bit on the skinny side, fairly good-looking, with a mustache. Christopher found him neither charming nor amusing and quite unattractive sexually. As Christopher might have foreseen if he could have looked at the affair objectively, Caskey soon lost interest in Keohane, deciding that he had changed since the old days and was now turning into a queen. As for Keohane himself, this reunion with Caskey probably hadn't meant all that much to him, even at the beginning, and he could get all the sex he wanted elsewhere. The two of them parted on friendly terms.

But, if Keohane had deflated Christopher's ego, it was soon
reinflated by John Cowan. All of a sudden, Cowan began to show a desire for Christopher's company. The two of them would lie talking on the beach, passing back and forth a bottle of mixed gin (or was it vodka?) and fruit juice. Christopher liked being with Cowan. Quite aside from his physical beauty, he was very entertaining, a hippie born before his time, a great talker, full of quotations from books he had read, stories of people he had met, charmingly irresponsible and cheerful. He flattered Christopher, asking him questions about Life, Eternity and God—treated him, in fact, as a guru. And then, one day, when they were at least halfway through their bottle, Cowan announced that there was someone in the Canyon he could really fall in love with, someone he would like to live with, if only that person were free. “Who is it?” Christopher asked. Cowan answered, “You.”

Christopher was overwhelmed, dazzled, delighted. To him, Cowan was now The Blond—more completely so than Bill Harris had ever been. And The Blond had chosen
him
! It was a mythic kind of honor, like being chosen by a Greek god as his human lover. Without doubt, Cowan was full of blarney and capable of saying anything which came into his beautiful head; Christopher knew this, but it didn't spoil his pleasure. For Cowan hadn't spoken as Cowan but as The Blond; and, in the myth world, the words of a god must always come true. It was in the myth world only that Christopher wanted Cowan; the idea of leaving Caskey and setting up housekeeping with Cowan in the everyday world was ridiculous. This Cowan probably understood, as clearly as Christopher did. They went to bed together once—in the garage apartment, one night when Caskey was out on the town. I think Christopher fucked Cowan, but I'm not sure. What remains is simply the sense of having taken part in a magic act, an act of intense excitement and delight—which nevertheless didn't ever have to be repeated, because it was essentially symbolic.

Sometime in 1946, Hayden Lewis started what was to be a long-lasting relationship with a young man named Rodney Owens. Rod was tall, dark, slender and very good-looking. He was also quite intelligent, funny, campy, charming and eager to be friendly. He and Christopher took to each other from the start—indeed, Rod used to tell Christopher later that he would have wanted to have an affair with him if he hadn't met Hayden first. The arrival of Rod improved relations between Hayden and Christopher, though it didn't remove their underlying antipathy. And Christopher had to admit that, for a while at least, Rod made Hayden nicer; they were desperately in love with each other and, during the first months,
couldn't bear to be parted even for a couple of days.

As far as I remember, Hayden and Rod went into business together quite soon after they met. They made ceramics—chiefly or entirely ashtrays—first in their home and later at a small workshop with several assistants. Rod proved to be an efficient businessman. In the course of a few years they became comparatively well-off.

Christopher and Caskey sometimes visited the Manns during 1946, at their Pacific Palisades house. I have a clear memory of Thomas holding forth with his urbane pedantry and good humor, smoking one of his big cigars. The extremely serious operation on his lung—Christopher was given to understand that it might be cancer, but apparently it wasn't—seemed merely a momentary interruption of Thomas's work—an interruption which Thomas refused to take seriously. By early June, he was back home safe from the Chicago hospital, still shaky, no doubt, but very much his former reassuring cigar-smoking self Christopher loved him for his toughness. He had simply made up his mind not to die before his novel was finished. In fact, he lived for another nine years, finished
Dr. Faustus
and wrote three more novels.
²⁴

Toward the end of the summer, the question of Christopher's citizenship came up again. I believe there had been a test case related to citizenship for pacifists which was decided favorably by the Supreme Court—anyhow, the regulations had been to some extent relaxed. So Christopher was examined and his case investigated, for the second time. I remember a hearing at which he was asked if he would be prepared to load ships in wartime. “Yes,” he said, “if they were carrying food.” “But not if they were carrying arms?” “No—not if they were carrying arms.” “Suppose, for the sake of argument, the cargo was entirely foodstuff except for one rifle?” Christopher looked at the questioner for a moment and then said, “
Honestly!
” This made them all laugh. Later, it was decided to grant his application—the decisive point in his favor being that he had actually volunteered for noncombatant service in the Medical Corps while the war was still on; he was over military age at the time and knew that the age limit was most unlikely to be raised again, but that didn't matter!

So, on November 8, Christopher went to the court downtown to be made a citizen. Peggy Kiskadden insisted on coming with him, as a sort of godmother. They found themselves part of a crowd of several hundred people—a number of them presumably pacifists, since this was (I'm fairly sure) the first opportunity for a pacifist to become a citizen, in the Los Angeles area. Because of the crowd, Christopher couldn't see the judge and could hardly even hear him. And now, after all his protests and explanations, he found himself required to take the ordinary oath of allegiance, without any modification whatever. He did so, reflecting that his objection to it was already a matter of record. After the ceremony, he used the privilege of a newly made citizen of the U.S. to rid himself legally forever of his two middle names.

This day, November 8, was also the sixth anniversary of Christopher's initiation by Prabhavananda. And it was to be the day of the first opening of
I Am a Camera,
out of town, at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951.

Late in December 1946, Christopher and Caskey flew down to Mexico City to spend Christmas and New Year's Eve. They visited the pyramids of Teotihuacán, Cholula, Puebla and a little town called Tepoztlán (maybe it's big and well known, nowadays) on a side road off the main highway to Cuernavaca. Tepoztlán impressed Christopher more strongly than any other place he saw on that trip. They arrived at sunset and went up onto the roof of the church, from which there was a long descending view through a gap in the hills to the coastal plain. Christopher experienced a moment of stillness and calm, sitting on the roof, which he can still dimly recall. He was drunk, as usual, but neither too much nor too little, and he had “that sense, which comes so seldom and so mysteriously, of having reached the right place at exactly the right moment.” (I quote from a magazine article—too slick to be worth reprinting in
Exhumations
—which Christopher published in
Harper's Bazaar
, June 1947. Caskey's photographs to illustrate it were rejected. Without consulting Christopher, the editors substituted for them an idiotic would-be-elegant art-posed picture of some gesturing boys and girls on a staircase, which had nothing to do with anything.)

While in Mexico City, Christopher and Caskey spent a good deal of time with a young painter [. . .] and his friend, an architect, whose name I have forgotten. [The painter] had a brother, [. . .] whom Caskey had known in New York. [The painter] was attractive, good-natured and “gay in a melancholy way” as so many Mexicans are. One night, when they were all drunk, Caskey kissed
him and Christopher got suddenly jealous and slapped Caskey's face. [The painter] was delighted. He embraced Christopher, exclaiming, “That's what we Mexicans are supposed to do—you are a real Mexican!” Back at the hotel, Caskey and Christopher made it up in a highly emotional scene and Christopher fucked him, which was unwise, because Caskey was having an attack of La Turista. This is the only occasion I can remember in my life when, as they say, I hit the jackpot.