■
1 I don’t remember that Denny and Willie ever got together during this visit; but it seems to me that Denny used to brag that he had been admired by Willie––at any rate from a distance––when he was in Europe before the war.
Curiously enough, Denny and Willie were to die on the same day, December 16; Denny in 1948, Maugham in 1965.
¾ 1945 ¾
41
All through July, Christopher had continued to see Steve. The day-to-day diary mentions only one meeting with Caskey––they had
spent the night on the beach, July 21. But at the beginning of August, a change is evident. Christopher sees Steve on the 1st and has supper with him on the 3rd. On the 4th, Denny is away in Mexico and Christopher stays at his apartment with Caskey. After that, Christopher and Caskey begin seeing each other regularly and there are no more meetings with Steve––except for a supper with Steve and his mother, probably a duty date, on August 22.
My memories of this switchover are very dim; perhaps incidents and conversations have been censored by Christopher’s feelings of guilt. Christopher’s guilt, if any, is uninteresting. The only important question is, did Steve mind being dropped? I think he probably did, much more than he showed; but I don’t believe he let it upset him for long. He was very self-reliant. It seems to me that Steve once said, “If I had a lot of money and could invite you out, everything would be different.” This (if he did indeed say it) was touching but quite untrue. Christopher never minded paying, as long as he was sure his guest wasn’t a gold digger––and never for one moment did he suspect Steve of that. Caskey didn’t have any
money, either.
Caskey or no Caskey, Christopher would have left Steve before long––because Steve didn’t fit into the rest of his life. Steve embarrassed him in every way, not only when they were in company but even when they were alone together. When Steve told
Christopher that he thought him much better looking than Gary Cooper, Christopher was amused, of course, but he also felt
depressed by the absurdity of the comparison. This was the wrong myth, the wrong kind of playacting; he couldn’t go along with it.
Even while they were screwing, Christopher often felt it was like a scene out of True Confessions.[*] And, when other people were there, Christopher always was aware of being on the defensive. He was watching to see how they would react to Steve. Would they
decide, like Denny, that Steve was “a department-store queen”? If Christopher had reached any real intimacy with Steve, he would have been ready to defy everybody. But he hadn’t and therefore he wasn’t. He wasn’t prepared to quarrel with his friends if they looked down on Steve, so he avoided taking the risk; he didn’t introduce Steve to the Beesleys or to Peggy Kiskadden or to Salka Viertel or to John van Druten.
All this sounds as if Steve swished, lisped, wriggled, wore makeup,
[* The American magazine.]
42
Lost Years
elaborate hairdos and flaming costumes. But he didn’t. He was quiet, pleasant, unsulky, well behaved. It wasn’t that he was, socially speaking, too much, he wasn’t enough. Christopher was a sexual snob––like most other people––and he needed a lover who could impress his friends.
Bill Caskey, on the other hand, was socially presentable––indeed, to a remarkable degree, if you considered how wildly he could misbehave in public, when he chose. “Earthy,” outspoken, crude, vulgar, violent as he could sometimes be, he was also able to project a southern upper-class charm to go with his Kentucky accent. Red-eyed, drunk and unshaven, he looked every inch a Eugene O’Neill Irish lowlife character; washed and shaved and sober, dressed in a Brooks Brothers shirt and suit, he was fit for the nicest homes.
Caskey really was a social amphibian, and Christopher was hugely impressed and attracted by this quality in him; he was––as he was later to prove––equally at home talking to the famous, or to little old ladies, or to fellow prisoners in jail, or to shipmates on an oil tanker; and, unless he was in the mood to pick a fight, nearly everybody liked him.
He was small––smaller than Christopher––very sturdily built, with square shoulders and the slightly bowed legs of a horseman. His brown hair was curly and he wore it very short to conceal this as much as possible. (“A crop-headed rascal” was Collier’s description of him.) His grey-blue eyes looked sleepy and his voice had a lazy sound. His over large but well-shaped head and his thick lips both had that Negroid quality which is so often apparent in the white Southerner. His body was sexily covered with a close fuzz of curly hair; there was even quite a lot on his back. He had very bad teeth (which he had the knack of hiding even when he smiled), a biggish cock and only one testicle.
Although Caskey was still so young, he wasn’t in the least boyish.
He had an impressive air of having “been around”––as indeed he had. He was quite without shyness, even in the presence of the old and the wise; it was this freedom from shyness which made him able to treat them so unaffectedly, and to charm them. (Both Stravinsky and Forster were delighted with him; Stravinsky said of him, “He’s my type.”) He had a domestic quality which made Christopher feel cozy and looked after, in the periods between their blazing home-wrecking rows. From this aspect, Christopher often reacted to him as if to a woman of his own age; he used to say that Caskey and he were like a sophisticated French married couple, the kind who address each other as “dear friend.” He also saw Caskey as a kind of nanny.
¾ 1945 ¾
43
Caskey had been in the navy for a while, but not overseas. He had avoided military service as long as he could and had got into some fairly serious trouble with the draft by failing to register or report. His lover, Len Hanna, an elderly and very wealthy man, had used his expensive lawyer to straighten things out. But the navy––in Florida or New Orleans or both––had turned out to be a bore, with lots of office work, which could only be relieved by parties and sex. Caskey had slept around a great deal, and then came one of those big homosexual witch-hunts; a few boys were caught and they named names. Caskey was implicated and so was his friend Hayden Lewis.
(Hayden was a civilian employed by the navy in some clerical job.
He and Caskey shared an apartment during several months of
Caskey’s service––they were what used to be called “sisters,” not lovers.) As Hayden was a civilian, he was merely fired. Caskey got a
“blue discharge,” neither honorable nor dishonorable. When he met Len Hanna again, he realized that he didn’t want to live with Hanna anymore, so he and Hayden decided to come to California.
Many people found Hayden Lewis attractive, and indeed he could then have been described as handsome; he had a pale romantic
melancholy face which suggested to Christopher a young
nineteenth-century Catholic priest of the Oscar Wilde period. But Hayden wasn’t really a romantic, his temperament was peevish, he sighed and whined and shrugged his shoulders and bitched people in a soft voice. He was one of nature’s underlings, full of envy; his approach was demure until he had detected your weak points and was ready to play on them. . . . In a word, Christopher disliked him intensely from their first meeting and Hayden undoubtedly felt the same way about Christopher. But Christopher had to get along with Hayden for Caskey’s sake, and Hayden had to get along with Christopher.
Christopher worked hard at this, to begin with, even though he knew that Hayden was trying to sabotage his relationship with Caskey by making fun of him. (It got back to him that Hayden called Caskey “Mrs. Reverend,” with the implication that Christopher was a sort of swami-curate.) Later on, there were at least two or three yelling scenes with Hayden––all started by Christopher, when drunk.