Only through God’s grace may we obtain those three rarest advantages
––human birth, the longing for liberation, and discipleship to an illumined teacher.
Nevertheless, there are those who somehow manage to obtain this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and an understanding of the scriptures––and yet are so deluded that they do not struggle for liberation. Such men are suicides. They clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves.
Shankara points his finger straight at Christopher. And what could Christopher reply, by way of an excuse? Nothing. What can he reply now?
Only that he has begun to struggle––very little and very late. (See also page 121
[note], for mention of yet another 1946 project.)
[* “The Emigration,” in D 1.]
¾ 1946 ¾
73
have written since then. It was always Christopher’s intention that they should be read by at least a few other people, so his sexual memories are almost entirely censored. I am filling in some of those blank spaces as I write this book.1
This period at Salka’s garage apartment now seems to me to have been the happiest in Christopher’s whole relationship with Caskey––
I mean, the happiest for Christopher. Caskey may well have felt 1 One episode occurs to me which I may as well record right away, because it has no connection with anybody I shall be mentioning in this book. It happened while Christopher was working at MGM, probably sometime in 1940.
In the men’s washrooms in the Writers’ Building, the partitions between the cubicles which contained the toilets didn’t come all the way down to the ground. In the open spaces between partition and floor, spittoons were placed, filled with water. I doubt if people spat into them, but they were convenient for putting out your cigarette. They also performed a function which certainly hadn’t been intended for them. When you were sitting on the toilet seat, you were able to see (dimly) the person who was sitting on the seat in the next-door cubicle. The water in the spittoon reflected him––or rather, a small section of him.
One day, when Christopher was thus seated, he glanced down at the spittoon to one side of him and saw the reflection of a naked erect cock, standing up out of its bush against a strip of bare belly. As he watched, a hand appeared and began patting it lightly, then stroking it, then gripping it and jerking it.
Instead of just watching and maybe jerking off too, Christopher gave way to curiosity. He wanted to see the face of the unknown masturbator. So he leaned forward until its reflection indistinctly appeared––quite forgetting that, as soon as he could see the stranger’s face, the stranger would be able to see his. The stranger did see it. For some moments, the two of them regarded each other––as wild animals might, on suddenly becoming aware of each other’s presence while drinking from a jungle pool. It was a subhuman confrontation, which excluded all possibility of pretense. It was also a marvellous opportunity.
Christopher might have said, “Let’s jack off together,” or he might at least have reassured the stranger by laughing or making a joke. Instead of which, he sat and stared. The other face withdrew its reflection, and then Christopher saw the reflected cock, no longer hard, being stuffed back into its trousers. Both of them sat perfectly still, listening.
At last, Christopher adjusted his clothes and left the cubicle. But he was still curious. He loitered in the passage, just outside the men’s room. About five minutes passed. Then the door swung open and the stranger came out. He recognized Christopher instantly, turned and hurried away. Christopher had a good look at his face. It was youngish, pale, unmemorable. They must have seen each other many times after this. But Christopher was never able to identify him for sure.
74
Lost Years
inhibited there, because he loved entertaining and cooking. But Caskey was busy, too. There was a second, downstair bathroom in the garage building, attached to a room which Peter Viertel had used as a “den.” Salka let Caskey have this bathroom for his darkroom. Caskey was taking a lot of photographs, including pictures in Venice, Ocean Park and waterfront Santa Monica which were to be illustrations in a book which Christopher and he were planning to do about The Beach. (This book never got finished––bits of its narrative appeared in a magazine article by Christopher called “California Story”––later, “The Shore”––but with pictures by Sanford Roth, much inferior to Caskey’s.1)
Christopher must have visited The High Valley Theatre sometime this year. He wrote an article about it which was published in Theatre Arts, June 1947.[*] The theater was in the Upper Ojai Valley and was run by Iris Tree and Alan Harkness. Here are some notes which Christopher must have taken during his visit––of dialogue between the teacher (either Alan Harkness or Ronald Bennett) and his student actors during a class in “the improvisation of psychological gesture”: TEACHER: Let’s have something of a fight. Not physical.
A STUDENT: Something from Noah?[†]
TEACHER: Not as outward as that. . . . Yes, and just one other condition––that the woman is separate. . . . Leave the face free. Do it more through the quality through you. . . . Even for the style, the fists are a little too obvious. Let’s go away and come together––
A STUDENT: I haven’t felt so static since 1943.
TEACHER: Now full tragic style––form a group around the center, with the quality of despair. . . . Now change it to clown style. . . .
Now a fairy tale––once-upon-a-time style. A wonderful little
creature is beginning to take shape, right before your eyes. . . . (To a student) Now, you be like Cornwall in Lear, who very darkly, thickly opposes. No, don’t act it. Yours is a warm powerful will. (To another student) Yours is thinner, but somehow withdrawing from it.
Caskey and Christopher both tended to be promiscuous sexually, but this didn’t, as a rule, upset the balance of their relationship. Their only problems were that they had one car between the two of them and that, if one of them wanted to use the garage apartment for sex, the other had to clear out. This could generally be arranged without inconvenience.
1 This article was published in Harper’s Bazaar, January 1952.
[* “High Valley Theatre,” Vol. 31, No. 6, pp. 64–6.]
[† Translated from Noé (1931) by André Obey.]
¾ 1946 ¾
75
Christopher was much more prone to jealousy than Caskey was,
but Caskey’s sex mates were usually casual pickups and he was always tactful when speaking of them to Christopher; he never made them seem important. As far as I can remember, Christopher only got seriously jealous once, during this period––and even then he had to admit that Caskey was behaving as well as he possibly could, under the circumstances. This was when a sailor named Jack Keohane[*]
showed up unexpectedly from Long Beach, on shore leave. Jack
Keohane and Caskey had been in the navy together in Florida and had had a passionate affair. (Hayden Lewis told Christopher with teasing bitchiness how, when he came home from his own job there, hungry for supper, he would find Caskey and Keohane in bed
together already, and how they would make love all evening till they fell asleep, without eating anything at all.) What had made Keohane extra desirable in Caskey’s eyes was that he had then only just “come out”; Caskey was his first male lover. He could therefore be classified 1A, a Real Man, and, by definition, hopelessly Christopher’s sexual superior. And The Past now gave him added glamor; he was like The Stranger in [Ibsen’s] The Lady from the Sea.
There is no doubt that Caskey was deeply stirred, at first, by Keohane’s reappearance. They went off together to a steambath downtown, after an evening of drinking. Later, there were trips down to Long Beach to visit Keohane there. Once or twice,