Lost Years (59 page)

    Igor, then sixty-eight, still had a trim well-coordinated figure. At that time, he was exercising every day. He showed a lot of energy, walking about, scrambling over rocks. He had a huge appetite and complained because they weren't able to get a meal exactly when he wanted one.

    While they were looking at the view of Mount Whitney from Moro Rock, Igor said that Derain had told him that a mountain is the most difficult of all objects to paint.

[
¹⁵
Oscar Wilde,
Lady Windermere's Fan
, act four.]

¹⁶
Briefly put, these insights were all about the character of Stephen. Christopher decided—for the first time, I believe—that Stephen should be bisexual. (“The degree to which this notion scares me only proves that I'm on the right track.”) Stephen has revolted from Quakerism as a young man but hasn't escaped from the puritanism which goes with it—so his occasional homosexual affairs have been guilty. Because he feels guilty, he has behaved irresponsibly toward his male lovers. Then he takes refuge in marriage to Elizabeth Rydal. But she can't satisfy him sexually. After her death, he marries Jane, who can. But Jane herself is promiscuous, and Stephen finds that he is jealous both of her lovers and of her. And Jane sometimes (as in the scene at the Hollywood party) deliberately takes a boy because she knows Stephen is attracted to him.

    Then, at the hostel, Stephen has his first serious homosexual relationship. He falls in love with the doctor, Charles Kennedy. It is Charles who makes the first advances, forcing Stephen to admit to his homosexuality.

    Stephen's bisexuality “—i.e., flirting because one can't make up one's mind—has to be exposed spiritually, economically, politically, socially, as well as sexually. Stephen has to find adjustment on all levels before the book ends.”

    “Stephen's conflict: he can't subscribe to Quaker mysticism or Quaker pacifism because he hates Quaker puritanism. And yet he is by nature a mystic and a pacifist. . . . If Stephen's ‘conversion' means anything, it means that he can accept an apparent paradox—i.e., he still believes in God—or more than ever believes in God—while doing something the God-mongers condemn—that is, loving another man.”

¹⁷
Dodie's suggestion was that the novel should start with the scene at the Hollywood party and the discovery of Jane and her lover fucking in the doll's house. So Stephen leaves for Sarah's home, where he finds Gerda but no other refugees. He tells Gerda about Jane and she laughs, making Stephen see the funny side of the situation. Then the Traubes arrive and Dr. Kennedy comes to attend Miss Traube, who is very sick. The first time Charles Kennedy is alone with Stephen, he refers to a character in
The World in the Evening
. The character is female but is actually a portrait of Stephen himself—this was Elizabeth's way of hinting to Stephen that she knew about his homosexuality. Stephen has long since realized this, and now Kennedy has guessed it. He is flirting with Stephen by asking him about this character. It is Gerda who finally tells Stephen (after he has been to bed with her—they get drunk to celebrate the news that her husband Peter has escaped from the Nazis) that he, Stephen, is in love with Charles Kennedy. So then Stephen goes to Charles and tells
him
. And, after that, they get together.

    There is another big entry in the notebook on July 12, which is a rough short draft of the first chapter, not too unlike the chapter which finally appeared in the printed book. On August 9, there is a redrafting of the opening paragraphs. Then no more entries in 1950. But Christopher evidently went on working during the fall.

¹⁸
“Jim lost no time in telling me that he misses nothing and nobody in Santa Monica, is perfectly happy here, and looks forward to staying through the winter. (Just the same, he was obviously very pleased to see me, and had even bought a special bottle of rum for us to drink after we went to bed at night in the house where he sleeps.) . . . Jim is now drinking very little, having no sex, making no trips to Flagstaff, even.” [For this and ensuing quotes from journal in text and in notes, see
D1,
pp. 427–31.]

¹⁹
“Peggy was pained by the untidiness in which the Kittredges live. . . . Mary Kittredge, Peggy pointed out, is a typical slovenly Southerner, and, said Peggy, there is a far wider gap between New Englanders and Southerners than between New Englanders and British. . . .

    “. . . (They gave us venison for dinner. Peggy heroically ate some.) . . .

    “Peggy says Bob Kittredge is the type of Easterner who was born one hundred years too late. He should have been an Indian guide; and now, though he comes out to the West and learns all about camping and hunting and wild life, he is really lost and isolated in the middle of the twentieth century.”

²⁰
Christopher later described the psychological atmosphere of this drive, in the journal: “Peggy's guilt at having been allowed to get her own way—” i.e., by refusing to visit Monument Valley—

 

(and I see she will get nothing else throughout this trip) occupied us with the most elaborate self-justifications and generalizations during most of yesterday's drive. But I didn't really care. I was . . . in a fairly well-balanced mood of happiness-unhappiness . . . thinking of the misery of the mess at Rustic Road . . . and of the slowly maturing war situation; and, at the same time . . . happy to be out on the endless blue levels of the plateau. . . .

 

What Christopher doesn't mention in any of these journal entries is the ambivalence of the relationship between himself and Peggy. On the one side, he is observing her and criticizing her rather bitchily. On the other side, he is playing the protective elder brother, looking after her and little Bull—who, incidentally, behaved like an angel throughout the trip. Even at this late date—they had known each other for more than ten years—their brother-sister relationship was slightly incestuous—that is to say, flirtatious. They would remind each other that they made a handsome couple and that they looked young for their ages. When they stopped that day to eat at a roadside restaurant, it amused and pleased them both that the waitress took Christopher for Bull's father. (Why in the world shouldn't she have?) Peggy had the impertinence to assure Christopher that nobody would ever suspect him of being homosexual, because he seemed one hundred percent masculine. And no doubt, in the innocence of her arrogance, she sincerely believed she was paying him a compliment!

    In the journal, Christopher notes that.

 

Peggy is much concerned with the change of life and anxious not to try to be attractive any more. (She will, though.) She is transferring her sexual vanity to her children, as bankers transfer money from a city which may be bombed. . . . Peggy goes on and on about her children until one could scream.

 

²¹
“Georgia O'Keeffe's house. The massive adobe walls—big round pine beams with cross rafters of aspen or cedar. In some rooms, old cedar has been used; it looks like bundles of firewood. The pastel colors of New Mexico—pinkish brown or grey of adobe, pale green of sage. The black modernistic chair sitting like a spider in a corner of the hot patio.”

²²
It was then that Christopher wrote in his journal and read F. M. Ford's
Parade's End,
another book he was reviewing for
Tomorrow
. The character of Sylvia Tietjens made him think of Caskey and the quarrels at Rustic Road:

 

We cannot settle anything by bargaining. We have to live this through, with great patience, but without any of that “neither-do-I-condemn-thee” stuff. Oh, I shall never, never get out of this rut until I do that, once. The funny thing is—it's exactly the subject of my novel (which looks promising, at present).

 

²³
Stieglitz used to maintain that the artist only needs a minimum of subject matter to work with. A vast number of his best pictures were all taken within a radius of a few yards, inside and outside his house on Lake George, New York—the interior, the exterior, the view from the porch, the poplars, the clouds.

²⁴
“Shrill, blonde-white witchlike Frieda, who is very sympathetic, and Angelino, who is rather too sleek and suave. Also, his Latin sex act bores me. He picked Peggy up in his arms, and this excited little Bull so much that he bit her in the buttock—'the haunch,' Peggy calls it.”

    Christopher says in the journal that the Del Monte ranch was “exactly as Lawrence described it in
St. Mawr
.” But he contradicts himself immediately by referring to the new house which Angelo had built since Lawrence's death,

 

blocking out the view from the old Lawrence house behind it; from jealousy, probably. It has a very squalid atmosphere, whereas the older house seems strangely joyful. The dead bees on Lawrence's bed, and the yellow
santo
[saint's image] and the string mat Lawrence made to sit on by the fireplace. A reproduction or small copy of the awful Lawrence painting Frieda has down in her house—the great tortured German frau dragging a factory after her by a harness of ropes and straining up towards a bearded Lawrence figure, who is rolling his eyes with horror and apparently fighting off another frau with a sword, maybe, or a radioactive rolling-pin. . . . Brett says she and Lawrence did all the work, while Frieda lay on the bed smoking cigarettes. But you can't believe a word these women disciples say of each other.

 

    Christopher took to Brett very strongly (was this partly because of her utter Britishness?): “I really love her, with her hearing aid and her enormous ass and absurd bandit's jacket. I said how good I always feel in the mornings, and she said, ‘Yes—but by the afternoon one has worried oneself into a fit.'” Christopher admired Brett's Indian paintings—and also “a very beautiful Union Jack, faded to rose pink” which she had on the wall of her house. (On her garage door she had painted the arms of her family.) But he thought her portraits of Stokowski were ridiculous and rather like the original paintings by Van Meegeren—the ones that
aren't
forgeries.

    That night, up at the Del Monte Ranch, Brett and her dog slept in Angelo's new house, while Georgia, Peggy, Bull and Christopher lay out of doors under the pines. Brett's dog set up a howl of the kind that dogs are supposed to utter when their master or mistress dies. So Christopher went into the house to investigate (playing the Man in Charge again) and found Brett peacefully snoring. Then Georgia told Christopher to recite poetry to put them to sleep but Christopher could only remember his basic repertoire of murder and ghost scenes from
Macbeth
and
Hamlet.
Bull loved every minute of it, because he was going to bed at the same time as, and with, the grown ups. They slept fairly well but awoke looking frowsy and crumple-faced. Christopher said, “Bull looks six, at least.” Georgia got up and went striding off through the morning woods, “walking the ditch” (as she called it), to keep the irrigation ditch clear of undergrowth. She triumphantly found that some animal had died in the tank, making the water stink. Christopher meanwhile visited Lawrence's tomb, which he describes as “amateur-dauby.” Nevertheless, this place was for him a very sacred shrine—perhaps the most sacred of any in his literary myth world. When he later happened to mention to Peggy that he had signed the guest book in the chapel, she was shocked; she found this touristy. So he didn't tell her that he had also taken two red flowers from the hillside in front of the chapel and pressed them in his billfold for relics.

    When they had returned to Taos, Peggy and Christopher visited Mabel Dodge Luhan

 

—a great disappointment, after all the stories about her witchlike fiendishness, jealousy and ruthless egotism. Such a dowdy little old woman—as Peggy said, “She's reverted to Buffalo.” She looks like a landlady. And her house is full of the stupidest junk. It was very sad; the feeling of the old days gone—John Reed gone—Lawrence gone—and this old frump stuck with her fat Indian man, building houses and drinking whiskey in the morning. And yet the stories persist. The woman who lent Mabel a jacket. Mabel wore it all summer, then returned it. One night, the woman was out riding in the jacket, and a bullet whizzed past her. She dismounted, ran to the nearest bush, where a young Mexican, whom she knew, was crouching with a gun. “Forgive me,” he gasped, “I thought you were Mrs. Luhan.”

 

²⁵
The Self-Sufficient Seagull

 

There was a wounded bird,

Who, like an awkward aeroplane,

Flew with one gear down.

 

It was a smooth-feathered seagull,

Swimming in slow circles,

Limping when aground.

 

He was no fishing frolicker,

Screeched not nobly

Reached no mate.

 

He made no cackling congress

At the prancing place, just

Sat in state,

 

Or swooped softly,

Quietly, along the leeshore—

Lonely.

 

[
²⁶
Not his real name.]

[
²⁷
Not his real name.]

[
²⁸
Not his real name.]

[
²⁹
Not his real name.]

[
³⁰
Not his real initials.]

[
³¹
Not his real name.]

³²
When Barry had a date with Christopher—or any other sex partner, presumably—he would bathe, shave, shampoo his hair and dress with extreme care. Christopher used to kid him about this, saying, “Five minutes after you arrive, you strip all those clothes off and toss them on the floor, and then we roll around till we're slippery with sweat and stinking like pigs, and then you, having carefully brushed your teeth and washed out your mouth with antiseptic, lick my ass and get shit on your tongue, and then I fuck you till my cock's smeared with shit which afterwards gets rubbed off on your belly—so why take all this trouble with your toilet?” [Taxman states that this passage is of doubtful authenticity and is extremely offensive and distasteful to him.]