Their relationship demanded violence. Christopher found that, in certain situations, he could only relate to Caskey by losing control of himself, and getting really angry––which he hated doing because it rattled all the screws of his English self-restraint loose and made him feel humiliated and exhausted for hours afterwards. During these scenes, he would yell at Caskey and occasionally hit him. Caskey, who was stronger than Christopher, very seldom hit him back.2 To have provoked the blow was, for Caskey, a kind of triumph. Even when he got a black eye or a bloody nose, his face would betray a deep sensual satisfaction.
These clashes took place when they were both drunk, but their drinking together didn’t necessarily lead to violence. Much more thrilled by Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room, with its harrowing bomb-detonation scene. He also read with interest and admiration James’s “Lady Barberina” and “The Author of Beltraffio,” Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, John Collier’s His Monkey Wife––but they haven’t made any lasting impression.
1 Christopher always thought of Caskey as being much more Irish than American. Actually, Caskey was also part Cherokee Indian. He himself believed that this strain was dominant.
2 When Caskey did hit Christopher, Christopher seldom hit him back, either.
One such occasion is mentioned in The Condor and the Cows—at Trujillo, Peru, on December 12, 1947.
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often, it made them lively and noisy or intimate and quiet. From Christopher’s point of view, at any rate, drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy. Christopher spent their first months together trying to get Caskey to make a real unequivocal declaration of love.
But Caskey was cagey––perhaps because he instinctively realized that this was actually, underneath all Christopher’s sweet-talking, a conflict of wills. Christopher felt himself becoming seriously involved and he didn’t want to be, until he was certain that Caskey was involved, too. He was willing Caskey to give way. When Caskey had done so and become his declared lover––well, then Christopher would be able to relax, take his time and decide finally if he wanted Caskey or if he didn’t. Probably he did. He merely wanted to be able to make his decision from a position of strength. He was saying, in effect, “Just because I don’t trust you, that’s no reason why you shouldn’t trust me.”
(Looking back on the situation, it seems to me that Caskey never did quite commit himself. Later on, he told Christopher that he loved him, but these declarations were nearly always followed by actions which seemed meant to contradict them; he would neck with
someone at a party in Christopher’s presence, or he would go out and stay away all night.)
The furthest Caskey would go, during these first months, was to say, “I like you enough.” But Christopher wasn’t discouraged; he had reason to believe that Caskey cared for him a good deal more than he would admit. Hayden reported to Christopher that Caskey had said, speaking of their relationship, “It’s so wonderful to be liked.”
This doesn’t sound wildly enthusiastic, but Christopher was well aware how embarrassing it must be for Caskey to confess to any feeling for Christopher in Hayden’s presence; Christopher was certainly an improvement on Len Hanna but, still and all, he was seventeen years older than Caskey! Christopher thought he could read, in Hayden’s manner toward him, a grudging admission that Caskey had fallen for him, and that Hayden, much as he deplored the fact, could do nothing about it.
Caskey was fond of telling Christopher teasingly, “You’ve got nothing left but your reputation and your figure”––to which
Christopher retorted that this was more than a lot of people could claim, at his age. Once, after they had been to an all-male party, Caskey said, “You know, I looked around and it was amazing––I realized I’d rather go to bed with you than anyone else in the room!”
At the end of some heavy sex making in the Beesleys’ chauffeur’s apartment, Caskey was gracious enough to declare, “That’s the best 54
Lost Years
queer fuck I’ve had in ages!” His compliments nearly always
contained such qualifications.
Caskey made a strict distinction between queer and straight fucks.
If you were homosexual, you couldn’t hope to be graded 1A; his greatest sexual pleasure was in going to bed with basically heterosexual men. He picked them up without difficulty and usually blew them. If he could get to fuck them, that was best of all. He used to say that straight bars were far better than queer bars for pickups.
Caskey’s preferences for heterosexual men irritated and frustrated Christopher throughout their relationship. Caskey went to bed with far more queers than straights, but he never let Christopher forget that this preference existed. Christopher sometimes suspected that it was Caskey’s way of keeping him in line.
If you started to analyze Caskey’s sexuality in psychological terms, you ran into paradoxes. On the surface, he was the most normal, most uninhibited of homosexuals; he seemed very tough yet very female. He loved getting into drag. He loved straight men. But, when you looked deeper, contradictions were revealed. Caskey
despised queens and didn’t think of himself as one. Never, never would he have dreamed of referring to himself as “Miss Caskey.” His attitude to heterosexual men wasn’t at all passive, he wanted to fuck, not be fucked by them. He never approached them with the
mannerisms of a homosexual. Indeed, he told Christopher that, when he was out to make someone, he always dressed “very tweedy, with a tie.” And yet he most certainly couldn’t be described as a closet queen; he declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect––except that you couldn’t imagine him joining any movement.
Since Caskey refused to regard himself as a queen, one might have expected him to prefer a somewhat effeminate homosexual sex-partner. But not at all. He was seldom attracted by feminine men. In a moment of enthusiasm, he once told Christopher that he was the most masculine person he had ever met––within grade 1B, of course.
This pleased Christopher, although Caskey modified the statement later and then denied it altogether.
Caskey had a love–hate relationship with Catherine, his mother, and a hate–hate relationship with his two sisters. He regarded the American Woman as a man destroyer. Sometimes, only half-jokingly, he would say that he regarded himself as a substitute––no,
“alternative” would be a better word––which he offered to the American Man. Years later, when Caskey was working on oil tankers and often crossed the Pacific, he found that he had no objection to ¾ 1946 ¾
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having sex with Asian girls. But this didn’t make him any less homosexual.
To judge from a photograph taken in his early twenties, Caskey’s father had been very attractive and very like Caskey. Now (according to Caskey) he was an alcoholic miser with an ugly disposition. He and Caskey quarrelled whenever they met, but Caskey didn’t
altogether hate him––since he was an American Man and Catherine’s victim. I seem to remember that Caskey’s father had made a lot of money by breeding horses. Caskey himself had ridden since he was a child. He loved horses, and perhaps this was the only interest that he and his father had in common. I think Caskey’s father and mother were now living apart.
The question arises, had Caskey been subconsciously on the
lookout for a substitute father and was he now casting Christopher in this role? Yes, I think he was, to some extent. In Caskey’s case, however, the father figure wasn’t to be merely a stand-in for Mr.