––as just another boy, another pawn in the sexual chess game. And 70
Lost Years
now Denny, that sly old chess player, had made a crude amateur mistake; he had challenged Caskey from a position of weakness.
Caskey saw his advantage and pushed their quarrel to the point at which Christopher had to choose between them.
Thus it was that Christopher’s friendship with Denny ended.
Christopher was sorry, of course. Denny may have been sorry,
too––yes, I’m sure he was. But he accepted the situation with his usual arrogant show of indifference. He was in one of his self-destructive moods, ready to break with anyone who wouldn’t submit to his will. Christopher, who was also capable of such moods, understood this perfectly. Though he had sided with Caskey, his sympathies remained with Denny. Looking back on the two
relationships, it seems to me that Christopher and Denny came closer to each other than Christopher and Caskey ever did.
My impression is that Denny soon left the Entrada Drive
apartment, subletting it to someone else, and went back East again, on his way to Europe. He never returned to Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Caskey and Christopher hunted around for a place to live. They were very lucky. Almost at once, Salka Viertel offered them her garage apartment. It had just become vacant and they could have it cheap. The apartment was on top of the garage, in a white wooden building which was next to but somewhat behind the house, so that the apartment windows overlooked the garden and had a glimpse of the ocean.
It was small but cheerful and full of light––one long narrow bed-sitting room, plus a bathroom and a balcony on which you could sunbathe without being overlooked, provided you lay on its floor.
This balcony greatly appealed to Christopher, who loved having sex out of doors.
The Mabery garage apartment had other more important
advantages over 137 Entrada Drive, as far as Christopher was concerned. Unlike Entrada Drive, it was relatively private because it was too small to hold a party in and because it was part of an impressive-looking home on a respectable street––beach acquaintances and other near strangers were scared of wandering in there uninvited. On the other hand, if you were in the mood for company, you could get it by merely walking downstairs and into the main house; Salka was always glad to see you and she usually had visitors.
Salka was the most perfect landlady-hostess imaginable. Caskey and Christopher were free to visit her at any time, to use her kitchen, to borrow her books. She welcomed any friend they brought with
them. Yet she would never dream of coming over to the garage
apartment without first phoning to ask permission; and she tactfully ¾ 1946 ¾
71
avoided confrontations with the people Christopher and Caskey didn’t choose to introduce to her.
Salka’s “salon” was still in full operation. All sorts of celebrities came to the house, not because Salka made the least effort to catch them but because they wanted to see her and to be with their own friends, who were also her guests. Actually, Salka was a somewhat self-effacing hostess. She greeted newcomers warmly and got them involved in conversation with earlier arrivals, then she disappeared into the kitchen to see how things were going. I remember her most vividly at this moment of greeting; she was strikingly aristocratic and unaffected. Her posture, the line of her spine and neck, was still beautiful; you could believe that she had been a great actress. I think most of her visitors were sincerely fond of her but perhaps they tended to take her for granted. It is slightly shocking to find that, in the indexes to the collected letters of two of her “stars,” Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, Salka’s name isn’t mentioned.1
Christopher liked living next door to the “salon,” as long as he was free to take part in it or leave it alone. A party anyhow lost some of its horror for him when he didn’t have to use a car to get to it and could escape from it so easily. He found many of Salka’s guests really interesting and he enjoyed introducing them to Caskey. Also, by doing so, he was promoting Caskey’s new career––for Caskey
usually made a good impression on them and thus got to photograph them.
Garbo seldom if ever attended the “salon” and Caskey never got to photograph her, but she was in and out of Salka’s house a great deal, during the daytime. (I think she and Salka continued to discuss film projects, although it was now becoming evident that she didn’t seriously intend to make another film.) Once Garbo had gotten used to seeing Caskey and Christopher around the place, she was absolutely at her ease with them. And, if Salka happened to be out when she arrived, she accepted them as substitutes. Being unemployed, with the whole day on her hands, she was ruthless in her demand to be talked to and walked with. Unlike Salka, she hadn’t the least hesitation in shouting up to the garage apartment and even climbing the stairs, to find out if they were home or not. At first they both quite enjoyed her visits; she was lively and campy and easily entertained. Then she became a nuisance. And one day, Christopher
found himself whispering to Caskey: “Imagine––if someone had told 1 To be fair, I must add that Salka herself, in her autobiography The Kindness of Strangers, mentions Christopher’s move into her garage apartment but says nothing about Caskey. Is this discretion or snobbery? Probably a mixture.
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Lost Years
us, six months ago, that we’d be hiding under this bed, to avoid going for a walk with Garbo!”
Christopher valued his privacy all the more because he had started working again,1 on a project which he found absorbing, even though it involved a great deal of copying. During the summer and fall of 1946, he made a typescript of the handwritten diaries which he had kept from the beginning of 1939 (his arrival with Auden in the States) to the end of 1944. There had been big gaps in his diary keeping; these he now filled with bridge passages of explanatory narrative. He also revised and expanded many of the diary entries.
This produced a typescript of at least 130,000 words––a very conservative estimate.[*]
Christopher found the work absorbing because it was, in fact, a review of his life in America and an apology for his actions and the decisions he had made during those six years––his involvement with Vedanta and the movies and pacifism, his decision not to return to England, his work with the Quakers, his move to the Vedanta
Center and his decision to leave it. The apologetic parts of the journals embarrass me now, but Christopher certainly got some important insights in the process of writing them. And the journals as a whole have been an invaluable quarry of material for books I 1 There was another literary project on which Christopher must have worked during 1946––a translation of Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination which Swami Prabhavananda made and Christopher polished. The book was published in 1947, which means that Christopher must have finished work on it before he left for England in January. I’m sure he didn’t take it with him.
When I think of Christopher at work on the language of Shankara’s brutally uncompromising opening statements, I realize what a profound conflict they must have stirred up in his own subconscious mind: