Lost Years (47 page)

The police sergeant who was in charge of the raid proved to be a foulmouthed bull of the old school. The other cops were younger and nicer—or at least more sophisticated. The sergeant declared that he recognized Christopher from the “faggot bars” downtown. Christopher assured him that this was impossible because he never went to them. When they got to the Santa Monica police station, the sergeant phoned headquarters to ask if Christopher and Jim had criminal records and was told, to his disgust, that they hadn't. This made him even more aggressive. He asked Christopher and Jim, “Are you two having a romance?” Then he had Christopher and Jim taken into separate rooms and questioned. Both of them were asked, “Are you a queer?” Jim said, “You must ask my psychiatrist.” When the question was repeated, he answered, “No.” Christopher also said, “No.” While the sergeant was out of the room, some of the other cops apologized, more or less, for his behavior, saying, “He's always
like that.” They asked Christopher how many times a week he did it. They weren't bullying now but giggly and teasing, like sexually inquisitive little boys. Christopher answered, “I don't have to tell you that,” but, when they laughed and agreed that he didn't have to, he did give them some kind of jokey answer, I forget what it was. After this, Christopher and Jim were let go, with warnings not to visit that kind of bar again. It's just possible that the cops had decided that Christopher and Jim weren't queer, after all, and were warning them lest they should be doped or made drunk by the fiendish faggots and then raped!

This actually not very dreadful ordeal has haunted Christopher ever since. Even as I write these words, I feel bitterly ashamed of him for not having said that he was queer. And yet I'm well aware of the counterargument: why in hell should you give yourself away to the Enemy, knowing that he can make use of everything you tell him?
²⁹

On December 5, Christopher had supper with Tito Renaldo. (He refers to this in the journal entry of December 6.) Tito had recently left Trabuco after a short try at being a monk. Christopher writes that, “Tito feels sad and lost between two worlds. He sits in his horrid
moderne
little apartment, waiting for the call to work at the studio, and drinking [. . .]. Soon he'll start having sex again, then asthma.” Poor Tito's life became, from then on, increasingly unhappy [. . .]. He returned to live at Trabuco later, but he couldn't settle there. He developed dark resentments against some of the other monks and revealed them in outbursts [. . .]. And yet he yearned for the Vedanta Society whenever he turned his back on it. “He clings to me,” Christopher writes, “as the only person who can understand the particular kind of mess he's in. But I can't really help him.”

The December 6 journal entry also contains a passage about getting up early and going down to the kitchen for breakfast which Christopher echoed, fifteen years later, in
A Single Man.
And there are a couple of paragraphs about his decision (made after talking to Dodie Smith at lunch on the 4th) to write the novel in the third person, because “I simply cannot believe in Stephen Monkhouse, or
any other fictitious character, as the narrator,” and because “I can't narrate this myself.”
³⁰

On December 9, the day-to-day diary records that Christopher had supper with Don Coombs and that he stayed the night. Don Coombs taught English at UCLA. Christopher had first met him at a party at Jay's. Maybe Jay had recommended him to Christopher as a good lay; it was Coombs who later told Christopher that he had enjoyed going to bed with Jay because “he made me feel beautiful” (
see here
). Anyhow, Christopher had kissed Coombs at that party and it had been agreed that they would soon have a date together.

Coombs was a pretty blond with big lips. He looked much better naked than in his demurely faggy clothes. His smooth cream-skinned body was well built. He was lively and shameless and he loved to be fucked. He had big firm, hotly inviting buttocks. (The day-to-day diary also records that Christopher had been visited that afternoon by [. . .] a tall muscular good-looking young man [he] had met on the beach. [The young man] had flattered Christopher by saying he wanted to fuck him and I believe this was the occasion on which [he] did it. Christopher was excited to be playing the passive role for a change but he didn't much enjoy the fucking; [the man's] cock was too large and it hurt him.)

After Coombs's uninhibited behavior in bed that night, Christopher was greatly surprised when he later confessed that he had been horribly 1eting Christopher. He had arrived
much too early for their appointment, gone into a nearby bar and downed several martinis to fortify himself, thrown up, and then managed to pull himself together so successfully that Christopher had noticed nothing strange in his manner when they finally met.

Coombs and Christopher met and fucked often after this. Coombs was prepared to admire Christopher and be amused by his jokes; he once said that Christopher had more vitality than anyone else he had ever known. Christopher had only one fault to find with Coombs; he was inclined to be stingy and never even offered to pay his share at a restaurant. Christopher finally spoke to him about this. Coombs took the rebuke in good part and afterwards told Christopher that he had been right.

On December 10, Christopher gave a party for some of the patients from Birmingham Hospital. I don't remember anything about this party, as distinct from my memories of other such parties later. There was always the problem of getting the quadriplegic patient—my impression is that Christopher only knew one of these personally—out of the car and into the house. And there was always a polite awkwardness until the patients were sufficiently drunk to be able to relax. The day-to-day diary says that this party included George Bradshaw and Fred and Renée Zinnemann; these were obviously invited because of their suitability as cohosts. I don't know how many patients came to the party, but there can't have been more than ten at the very most, considering the smallness of the living room and the extra space required for the wheelchairs.

Christopher's last journal entry for 1949—on December 14—is full of self-scoldings.
³¹
Christopher has decided that he is going
through the “change of life”; he says that Gerald Heard put the idea into his head. About Caskey, Christopher writes that he hates being alone but that he doesn't “exactly” want Caskey back “—at least, I certainly don't want him the way he was when he left.”

On December 17, Christopher drove down to the AJC Ranch with Russ Zeininger. John van Druten and Carter Lodge were both there and Dave Eberhardt (
see here
) was staying with them. Dave and Christopher hadn't seen each other for a long time. No doubt they picked up their flirtation where they had dropped it, which would explain why Christopher went round to Dave Eberhardt's place in Los Angeles two days later, to have supper with him. (I believe Dave and Don Forbes had now [stopped sharing an apartment].) At Dave's, that evening, was a youth named Michael Leopold. There was a lot of talk and drinking, at the end of which Christopher decided to stay the night; perhaps he was too drunk to drive home. I'm almost certain that he didn't go to bed with either Dave or Michael Leopold on this occasion. It could be that Dave and Michael had sex with each other. Anyhow, Michael came to visit Christopher at Rustic Road on December 23 and they started what was to be an on-and-off but longish affair.

Michael was then about eighteen; a Jewboy with thinning hair, a high forehead, spectacles (his sight was very poor), a cute cheerful face (resembling Anne Francis, a starlet of the period), a hideously ugly Texan accent (which Christopher tried to persuade him to modify) and a pair of long sturdy legs (of which Christopher thoroughly approved). He was intelligent, ardently literary, a tireless talker and sex partner. He had a wild laugh. He amused Christopher and flattered him outrageously and excited him considerably. Christopher later discovered that he was a pathological liar. His taste in males was catholic—ranging from boys of his own age to men in their sixties, so Christopher had no reason to feel embarrassed by the
age gap. Besides, Michael was evidently drawn most strongly to elder brother and father figures. He often talked of a marine sergeant who had taken him up to a hotel room and kept him there several days a prisoner, well fed and well screwed. (This may of course have been one of Michael's many fantasies.)

Christopher often found Michael exasperating but nevertheless became very fond of him. It was easy to love Michael in bed, he enjoyed himself so heartily, he gave his body so completely to the experience—kissing, wrestling, rimming, sucking, being fucked and fucking with equal abandon. (Once, when Christopher had got drunk and passed out, Michael greased Christopher's asshole and fucked him—or so he later claimed.) When Michael was reaching an orgasm, he would utter screams of lust which could surely be heard by the neighbors.

Michael stayed with Christopher at the Rustic Road house from December 26 through the 28th and returned on the 31st to spend the night—or what was left of it, by the time Christopher had got back from two New Year's Eve parties—at Salka Viertel's and Gottfried Reinhardt's.
³²
(Despite all the pleasure he had had with Michael, Christopher's loneliness or his mental itch caused him to get Don Coombs to come and have sex with him on December 29—either for variety or because Michael wasn't available.)

But Michael had more than sex to offer. He was also eager to become Christopher's literary disciple. He asked Christopher endless questions about writing. He dipped into the books on Christopher's shelves and then wanted to hear Christopher's opinion of them. He brought a story with him which he had begun to write and worked on it down in the living room while Christopher was working upstairs in the glassed-in porch.
³³
Thus their brief acquaintance was
already taking on an aspect of domesticity. Christopher was under no illusions that he and Michael could set up housekeeping together. Christopher wasn't in love with him, wasn't at ease with him when he chattered and showed off, didn't believe that he had much, if any, literary talent. And yet, Christopher and Michael came close to each other; Christopher felt an unwilling kinship with this freaky young creature. They were somehow two of a kind.

On December 20 and 23, Christopher sat for the artist Nicolai Fechin. Fechin lived in a big dark old redwood house which was rather like the inside of a sailing ship—at the back of the Canyon. He was a friend of Jo Lathwood and Ben Masselink; an amiable Russian genius. He drew Christopher in charcoal. At the end of the first sitting, the drawing looked so wildly romantic—a kind of Nordic hero—that Christopher protested. When it was finished it had become one more in the series of Fechin's anthropological portraits—a typical specimen of Intellectual Man—angry looking but also flattering, in a different way. I still have a photograph of it. I don't know what Fechin did with the original.

On December 30, Christopher had supper with the Stravinskys and Robert Craft at their house. Aldous and Maria Huxley were
there. I have a memory—which, I believe, belongs to this occasion—of Christopher lying on the floor, dozy with drink. Christopher looks up and sees Aldous towering skyscraper-tall above him—ignoring Christopher with English tact, as he talks aesthetics to Igor in French.
³⁴

¹
The day-to-day diary's list of books Christopher read in 1948 includes:

    
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, The Bostonians
(James),
The Mint
(T. E. Lawrence),
Nostromo
(Conrad),
Le Sabbat
(Maurice Sachs),
The Loved One
(Evelyn Waugh),
Hindoo Holiday
(J. R. Ackerley),
End as a Man
(Calder Willingham),
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
(Dylan Thomas),
Ape and Essence
(Aldous Huxley),
I Capture the Castle
(Dodie Smith),
Cry, the Beloved Country
(Alan Paton),
The Seven-Storey Mountain
(Thomas Merton),
The Plague
and
Caligula
(Camus),
The American People
(Geoffrey Gorer),
No Exit
(Sartre),
A Treasury of Science Fiction
(edited by Groff Conklin). There are more thrillers listed this year than usual, probably because Christopher did so much travelling and therefore required travel reading.

    Christopher got interested in Steffens through knowing Ella Winter and her terrifically sexy son Pete Steffens. He found the
Autobiography
very curious; there is something a bit fiendish and inhuman in Steffens's personal liking for the men he exposed and ruined.
The Bostonians
is still my favorite long novel by James—indeed, the only one I really like. Christopher read
The Mint
while staying with Victoria Ocampo at Mar del Plata (see
The Condor and the Cows
[chapter ten]); it hadn't yet been published. It was a bit of a disappointment to him, since he had been expecting something prodigious, but it left many vivid new impressions of demure, humble-arrogant, masquerading Lawrence—about whom Forster, after hours of reminiscence, had sadly delivered the verdict, “One didn't altogether like him.” Christopher found
Nostromo
noble and masterly but unmemorable.
Le Sabbat
, which he noticed by chance in a Buenos Aires bookstore, appealed to him as sex gossip about people who interested him. He had never heard of Sachs before and liked his shamelessness. He read the book in French; there was then no English translation. He passionately hated
The Loved One
for its condescending attitude toward California. Later readings, while working with Tony Richardson on the film, have convinced me that this is a mean-minded, sloppily written production, probably Waugh's worst and utterly unworthy of his talent.
Hindoo Holiday
must have been a rereading. I wish I could remember what Christopher thought of it in the light of his now increased knowledge of things Indian, but I don't.
End as a Man
was an exciting discovery and the beginning of Christopher's (more or less) constant enthusiasm for Willingham's work. He loved
Portrait of the Artist
, particularly the chapter called “One Warm Saturday.” He was shocked by
Ape and Essence
, feeling that Aldous's besetting distaste for the world and the flesh had gotten quite out of control here and produced something cheap and nasty. Against his will, he had to agree with Peggy Kiskadden on this. Peggy, as usual, had no qualms about expressing her opinion unasked for; she told Aldous exactly what she objected to. Christopher kept his mouth shut. But he was forced to say something complimentary to Dodie Smith about
I Capture the Castle,
though it seemed to him mere magazine writing.
Cry, the Beloved Country
was recommended to Christopher by James Stern. The opening seemed so technicolored that Christopher nearly put the book down, but he read on and was tremendously moved. In the November 6 journal entry, Christopher says that he is reading
The Seven-Storey Mountain
and that he is repelled by Merton's Catholic arrogance. But he was also attracted by the very grimness of the Trappist death to the world—which is admittedly far more terrifying but also perhaps easier than trying to be a monk at the permissive Vedanta Center. Christopher admired
The Plague
; it seemed to him altogether different from Camus' fakey
Stranger
. He read into it an antiheroic, anti-Hemingway message—that suffering and death are not romantic and that even a brave and noble doctor would much rather not have to fight a plague.
Caligula
is dimly remembered for one funny scene in which the emperor holds a poetry competition. Christopher thought
No Exit
as phoney as
L'Étranger
. He was delighted with Gorer for saying that, while the European male fears that the homosexuals will seduce his children, the American male fears that they will seduce him. Groff Conklin's science fiction anthology was recommended, I think, by Gerald Heard. (Gerald's story, “The Great Fog,” is in it.) The Conklin anthology Christopher read first was the one published in 1948; later he got an earlier one, published in 1946. The story which made the greatest impression on Christopher was Lawrence O'Donnell's “Vintage Season.” These books were his introduction to the new school of science fiction writers.