partners, to prove to himself and them that he had been completely released. It was at this time that he had his first orgasm with Christopher.)
That first evening in bed together, Barry said, “How extraordinary this is! Here am I, a Russian Jew, making love with Christopher Isherwood!” His remark jarred on Christopher; it seemed indecent, masochistic, sexually off-putting. But, as Christopher got to know Barry better, he found a different significance in it. When Barry thus called attention to his Jewishness, he wasn’t really demeaning himself. He wasn’t at all a humble person. Indeed, he had that Jewish tactlessness, argumentativeness and aggressiveness which always aroused Christopher’s anti-Semitic feelings. Only, in Barry’s case, Christopher’s anti-Semitism quickly became erotic. It made him hot to mate Barry’s aggressiveness with his own, in wrestling duels which were both sexual and racial, Briton against Jew. Barry’s aggressiveness became beautiful and lovable when it was expressed physically by his strong lithe body grappling naked with Christopher’s. As they struggled, Christopher loved him because he was a pushy arrogant Jewboy. But he never talked to Barry about his feelings. They were too private.[*]
[* Taxman finds this passage to be apocryphal and extremely offensive and distasteful to him.]
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Barry soon desired these duels as much as Christopher did, though for a different reason––at least, that is my guess. Barry had never wrestled with any of his other lovers. And his approach to sex had been from the yin side only; he wanted to be possessed. But now Christopher had, without consciously meaning to, made him aware of his yang self. When he wrestled with Christopher, he was all boy and he seemed to delight in his own virility. Switching back to yin again, after the fight, was a new sensation for him; the contrast between the two selves may well have made him enjoy being fucked more than ever. He and Christopher were always hot for each other.
At this time, Christopher saw a good deal of Gerald Heard1 and Michael Barrie, also of Frank and Nan Taylor––of Frank rather than Nan, because Frank turned his queer friends into sexual conspirators against his own marriage, telling them all about his affairs with other men, and Nan hated them for it. It was at the Taylors’ house that Christopher saw a showing of the semiprofessional film of Julius Caesar which had been shot on locations in and around Chicago, with Charlton Heston, then almost unknown, as a beautiful Mark Antony. As far as I remember, the scenes of Caesar’s murder were played in a neoclassical bank building and the battle of Philippi took place among the sand dunes of Lake Michigan. On September 6,
1 I wish I had at least some record of Christopher’s talks with Gerald at this period. I remember only that his chief interest was in the many sightings and alleged sightings of Unidentified Aerial Objects––flying saucers. Gerald believed in them wholeheartedly and would soon publish Is Another World Watching?, in which it is stated that June 24, 1947 (the Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mount Rainier) “may prove to be one of the most important dates in history.” Gerald told Christopher that, “Liberation is my vocation, the saucers are my avocation.” He expressed the wish that one of the objects would land and require a human go-between to explain the ways of earth men to their people and to be instructed in their own culture, as far as that was possible.
Gerald longed to be this go-between. I think he had elaborate fantasies about the role he would play––including the brilliant, epigrammatic lectures on Earth history he would deliver and maybe even the splendid space costumes he would wear. I remember Gerald as being very cheerful in those days. Yes
––now a memory comes to me. It belongs to August 30, when, according to the day-to-day diary, Gerald, Michael Barrie and Christopher, “Picked up Harold’s Rolls.” The Rolls belonged to Harold Fairbanks––that much I’m sure of––but how Harold had acquired it, where they were taking it and for what purpose, I don’t know. It was a handsome old car, and Gerald enjoyed its faded grandeur. They were all three laughing and chattering, and suddenly Gerald exclaimed, “What good talk!” I can still picture his face as it looked at that moment, lit up with the vivid pleasure of a connoisseur. And I can hear the tone of his voice, so melodiously Irish. At such moments one glimpsed him as he must have been when he was young and unholy.
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Frank and Christopher had supper at the Hartford Foundation with its manager, Michael Gaszynski, a Polish nobleman who also had a cheesecake concession at the Farmer’s Market. Michael was all smiles and politeness in those days––later on, when Christopher became a trustee and began staying at the foundation, they were forced into being enemies.
On September 5, Christopher drove with Sam From to spend the
evening in Santa Barbara. I think this was the occasion on which Sam was so drunk that he made a swerve off the Pacific Coast Highway just after they had left the Canyon and very nearly turned his open convertible right over. Christopher was lucky––for Sam was a
frequently drunk driver and this might well have been a fatal wreck.
Sam finally got killed in a collision which was agreed to have been entirely his fault.
On September 14, the day-to-day diary records that Bob Craft, Eduard Steuermann (Salka Viertel’s brother) and someone named Dahl “went through” the text of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire with Christopher. I do remember that Bob had proposed to Christopher that he should speak the “speech-song” at a performance somewhere, and Christopher had agreed. But the performance never took place. Maybe the musicians decided that Christopher’s voice wasn’t right for the part.[*]
On the night of either September 16 or 17, one of the sycamore trees near the house suddenly fell. I remember that Christopher woke abruptly, about half a minute before this happened. Later––maybe in order to intrigue Gerald Heard, who loved all things extrasensory
––he ascribed his waking to precognition; but it is more likely that Christopher had been woken by a preliminary cracking sound; such a sound, in the dead of night, could be quite as loud as a gunshot.
The tree narrowly missed the house. If it had hit, it would probably have staved in the roof.
Mentioning the fall of the tree reminds me that the sycamores quite often dropped their limbs and occasionally did serious damage.
It must have been about this time that Christopher happened to be looking out of the window when a big branch fell from one of the trees on the other side of the road. Its fall was broken by some lower branches, otherwise it would have hit the house below it. Even so, it was a serious menace, because the next strong wind would almost
[* Robert Craft conducted Pierrot lunaire in New York the following October, but recalls asking Isherwood for help only with possibly improving the translation made by Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970), a composer and refugee who was a close friend of Stravinsky.
According to Craft, the speaking part for Isherwood would have been in Stravinsky’s The Flood, much later, in 1962.]
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certainly shake it loose. Christopher therefore immediately crossed the road and rang the doorbell of the threatened house. The woman who lived there opened the door and he explained to her what had happened. This was the first time he had ever spoken to her. She didn’t seem at all grateful to him. On the contrary, her manner was hostile and suspicious, as if she were thinking, “Why is he telling me this? What’s he really want?”
Some weeks later, Christopher was visited by one of his
neighbors, who told him that this woman was psychotic and a threat to the whole community. “I’m going to get something on each one of them,” she was alleged to have said, and she kept reporting her suspicions to the police. She had gone all the way down to Balboa in the hope of discovering that a man she knew was keeping a