Lost Years (30 page)

Lincoln and Christopher spent the night at Auden's house. They had to share a bed. Lincoln, for the first and only time, made a pass at Christopher—a half-joking, tentative pass, which Christopher jokingly declined. Christopher was ready to have sex with most males within reasonable age limits, and he certainly didn't find
Lincoln all that unattractive. But he hated mixing sex with giggles.

On August 3, Caskey and Christopher were at Isa Jennings's country house, to swim and have supper. Garbo was there, with George Schlee. Noël Coward arrived late and made a big theatrical entrance. Christopher had always been rather prejudiced against Coward—whom I don't think he had ever properly met. He watched sourly as Coward moved with the modest graciousness of royalty among the guests. Garbo got a speech of homage which Christopher thought disgustingly phony and even the lesser lights were presented with a compliment apiece; Christopher had to admit that Coward was inventive, he found a different way of flattering each of them, and each one beamed. Just before Christopher's turn came, he said to himself, “I wonder what kind of shit he'll try on me.” They were introduced. Coward reacted strongly. Then, in an almost loverlike tone of shyness, he told Christopher, “It's extraordinary—you look so much like one of the great heroes of my youth, Lawrence of Arabia!”

Christopher often told this story later, mockingly. Yet that day was the beginning of a permanent change in his attitude to Coward. Subconsciously, Christopher started finding reasons to admire him and think him sympathetic. Which wasn't difficult, for there are many. Christopher, that shameless flatterer, had had his ass tickled by a master, and had loved it. Characteristically, he didn't bother to remember what compliment (if any) Coward had paid Caskey.

Caskey and Christopher were given a ride back into town by Garbo and George Schlee. (Caskey and Christopher had come out to the country by train because their car was being repaired.) Christopher was fairly drunk and took this opportunity of attacking Garbo. He told her that her custom of addressing him as “Mr. Isherwood”—and of refusing in general to address her old acquaintances by their first names—was sheer affectation and arrogance and egomania. Did she actually think that
he, Christopher,
had to be kept at a distance, lest he should take some advantage of her? Was she really so paranoid? Hadn't it ever entered her head that there were
some
people on this earth who didn't give a damn about her fame or her money or even her appearance—who simply wanted to be friendly?

I don't remember that Garbo said anything in reply to this. She was sitting in the front seat with Schlee—a position which made it easy to ignore a backseat scolder. Christopher probably continued until he ran out of breath. Later—no doubt because he felt he had made an ass of himself—he turned his attention to the ever-silent
self-effacing Schlee and began to praise Schlee's driving in extravagant terms. (Was this done partly to bitch Caskey, whose speeding terrified Christopher whenever Christopher was sober?) Oddly enough, in retrospect, it is Christopher's corny compliments to Schlee that I feel ashamed of, not his rebukes to Garbo.

After that evening, Christopher didn't see Garbo for nearly a year. But she hadn't forgotten what he had said to her. When they next met, at Salka Viertel's house in California, in July 1948, she gaily told Salka, “Mr. Isherwood was very
cruel
to me, when we were in New York”; as she said this, she arched her eyebrows in an expression of comic anguish. Obviously, she didn't bear him any grudge. She could afford not to, for she was invulnerable, as far as he was concerned. Nothing he could possibly say could get under her skin. He, who had always found her absurd, now had to realize that she found him even absurder. Indeed, she made this quite clear at a dinner party at Salka's about two months later, when she suddenly announced to the guests, “Mr. Isherwood has
such
beautiful legs!” This tribute from a senior love goddess to a queer in his mid-forties seemed farcical. Everybody laughed. Christopher laughed with them, but only he would savor Garbo's compliment as a subtly malicious echo of Noël Coward's. He often quoted this one too, and in the same tone of mockery—nevertheless, his ass had once again been deliciously tickled.

On August 4, Christopher had lunch with Andrew Lyndon and Harold Halma at their apartment. Harold had to go out immediately afterwards, leaving Christopher and Andrew alone together. It was very hot. After several drinks, Andrew asked Christopher if he'd like to take a shower. This was merely a cue for both of them to undress. Christopher fucked Andrew. When it was over and they were lying naked on the bed, Harold arrived back unexpectedly early, his arms full of groceries. Maybe he had hoped to catch them, for he didn't seem surprised. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, put down his shopping bags in the kitchen and left the apartment again. Andrew wasn't at all dismayed. “I'm awfully glad we did that,” he told Christopher—who got the impression that Andrew's seduction of him was largely a declaration of independence, addressed to Harold. Christopher put his clothes on quickly and left before Harold returned. He didn't feel particularly guilty but he did feel embarrassed. To get caught like that—even if Harold had planned it—was humiliating and lacking in style. And Christopher liked Harold and didn't want to cause him pain. So, three days later—having made sure that Andrew would be away for the evening—Christopher phoned Harold and asked if he might come around. Harold may have felt hostile but he agreed.
They drank together and the tension eased. Christopher began making it clear that Harold attracted him. Although Christopher had an ulterior motive, he was quite sincere in this. The very fact that he had fucked Andrew made him hot to be fucked by Harold; he pictured himself submitting to it as a brutal but exciting punishment, inflicted by the injured party, this muscular sexy young man. In fucking Christopher, Harold would ejaculate the seed of jealousy out of himself and he would no longer feel excluded from the triangle. . . . However, when Christopher finally asked Harold straight out to come to bed with him and Harold refused, Christopher wasn't greatly disappointed—for his mission was accomplished anyway; to have made the pass was as good as having let himself be screwed—he had effectively disqualified himself as a sexual menace in Harold's eyes.

There was a further step to be taken, however. Christopher feared that Harold might tell Andrew about Christopher's pass, to punish
him
by making him feel that he had been just another in a long line of Christopher's lays, chosen merely because he had been easy to get. Therefore Christopher had to talk to Andrew as soon as possible—preferably before Harold told him—and explain why he had made the pass at Harold. In fact, it was several days before Christopher got this opportunity. When he did, he was relieved to find that Harold hadn't told Andrew anything. Christopher's fears had been founded on a knowledge of his own character—“man imputes himself,” as Gerald Heard was so fond of saying. But Harold wasn't Christopher. If Harold had been in Christopher's place, I'm sure he would never have boasted to his friends, as Christopher later did, about the affair and the tact he himself had shown in handling it.

At this time, Lincoln Kirstein was going through a phase of tremendous enthusiasm for the sculpture of Elie Nadelman. On August 5, he drove Christopher and Caskey out to a house in the Bronx (maybe it was Nadelman's former home) in which a lot of the work was stored. Lincoln had filled the living room with a selection of the pieces and he came every day to dust and rearrange them, like a priest taking care of a shrine. Indeed, this art cult
was
Lincoln's religion. And how beautiful and noble his half-crazy passionate devotion seemed, compared to the prim knowingness of the ordinary “art lover.”

Next day, Christopher and Caskey were initiated into another of the mysteries of Lincoln's religion. He took them down to Washington to see a collection of paintings which had been brought over from Germany. I'm vague about the details, but I think that the
paintings had been hidden in a salt mine for safety during the war and that Lincoln himself had been partly responsible for discovering their hiding place. I assume that the paintings had been appropriated from their original owners by high-ranking Nazis like Göring, so that they were now technically stolen property; for Lincoln explained that their presence in the United States had to be kept secret lest the new German government should protest and demand their instant return. The room in which they were hung was guarded by military police, and Lincoln, Caskey and Christopher were escorted into it by an official of the State Department. I remember the thrill of this contact with the world of Classified Material—but not, unfortunately, anything about the paintings themselves, except that they were all by famous masters. Caskey and Christopher were proud of this privilege Lincoln had obtained for them. They bragged about it to their friends and were therefore disgusted when the State Department changed its policy soon afterward for some unknown reason and allowed the paintings to be taken on tour around the U.S. and exhibited publicly in various cities, before being sent back to Germany.

Christopher and Caskey were now beginning to get shots and visas, in preparation for their South American journey. Their last month in New York became increasingly social. At Ollie Jennings's house, Ben Baz had been joined by his brother Emilio and by Luis Creixell from Mexico [. . .]. Then Berthold Szczesny arrived from Buenos Aires with Tota Cuevas de Vera.
⁴³
Then Stephen Spender
appeared; he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Then Chris Wood paid a visit from California. Through him, Caskey and Christopher met John Gielgud. Through Stephen, they met Frank
and Nan Taylor. Through Berthold, they met Victoria Ocampo. And, as if all this wasn't enough, Bill and Peggy Kiskadden happened to be attending some medical conference in New York, and Caskey's mother came up from Lexington, Kentucky, to help him and Christopher get packed. The day-to-day diary mentions several other encounters—notably with Mina Curtiss (Lincoln Kirstein's sister), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean Stafford, Harold Taylor (the president of Sarah Lawrence), Jinx Falkenburg, John Hersey, the Countess Waldeck, John Home Burns.

Christopher's first impression of John Gielgud (September 10) wasn't favourable. Gielgud talked bitchily about Dodie Smith—or rather about Alec Beesley, whom he disliked. This put Christopher off him—which Christopher evidently showed, for Gielgud said at a later meeting (in 1948 in London) that he had been aware he had offended Christopher and that he was sorry for it. Thus they became
friends. Perhaps Christopher had been too hard on Gielgud to begin with. But it is still my opinion that Gielgud got nicer as a person—
and
better as an actor—as he grew older.

Frank Taylor was a publisher—I think, at that time, he was still with Random House. Nan was his wife. I won't describe them yet because Christopher didn't really get to know them until they came out and lived in Hollywood in 1948 and after. This year, Christopher met Frank only twice. I seem to remember that he had a violent crush on Stephen and that they'd been to bed together.

Victoria Ocampo appears in
The Condor and the Cows
. She is described fairly, I think, though a bit too politely. What a bullying old cunt!

It was probably in the latter part of August that Berthold Szczesny told Christopher the ghost story which is printed in
The Condor and the Cows.
“Told” isn't the right word; it would be more accurate to say that Berthold performed it. He hammered on the door of the apartment early one morning, staggered in and dropped limply into a chair, muttering that he had been lying awake all night, too scared to be able to sleep. Then he let Christopher draw the story out of him, bit by bit—how he had walked into the El Morocco and seen a young man who looked vaguely familiar, a young man in a dark blue suit, rather pale-faced but quite ordinary; how this young man had come over to him from the bar and Berthold had said, “I believe we know each other,” and the young man had answered, “Certainly we know each other; you buried me in Africa”; how Berthold had recognized him then, as a shipmate on a German boat, who had died of malaria and been buried on the bank of the Gambia River; how the young man had added, “But don't tell anyone, because I'm here on leave,” and how Berthold had felt as cold as ice all over and had run out into the street.

Berthold certainly did look badly shaken that morning, but he kept smiling apologetically, as much as to say that he didn't expect Christopher to believe all this. The smiles were curiously convincing.

He then told Christopher that he had made up his mind to go back to the El Morocco that evening. “If he's there I'll walk right up to him and hit him as hard as I can, right in the face. And if he's got a face—if there's anything there, you understand—then I'll pay damages, a hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars—what does it matter? Only I have to hit him—to be sure . . .”

The next day, Berthold reported what had happened: “I go back to El Morocco and there he is. Just the same as last night, sitting at the bar. And so I come up, all ready to hit him. I think he doesn't see me. But just when I get quite close, he turns around and I see that
he's very angry. He says: ‘I told you already—I'm on leave. I don't wish to be disturbed.' He says that very quietly, and he sits there looking at me. I can't do anything. My arms are weak, just like a baby's. I turn around and go out of the bar . . .”

After this, Berthold told Christopher that he had visited El Morocco several more times but that the young man was never there.

I'm not sure if Christopher ever fully believed the story. I think he did almost—though he knew that Berthold could lie with great inventiveness. (The story as Christopher tells it in
The Condor and the Cows
is itself faked, up to a point—that is to say, it is presented as a single unbroken narrative, because Christopher couldn't be bothered to explain to the reader that he had heard it in installments.) Some years later, Christopher learned from Maria Rosa Oliver that Berthold had confessed to her he had made up the whole thing. Christopher was hugely impressed by all the trouble Berthold had taken; his playacting seemed to show a genuinely disinterested wish to entertain, which is the mark of a real artist.