Christopher went along and tried to behave well, on the lines of “any friend of Billy’s is a friend of mine . . .” but, when alone again with Caskey, he sulked. Caskey took Christopher’s jealousy as something tiresome but neutral, he didn’t attempt to reassure Christopher; he was frankly under Keohane’s spell and made no secret of the fact that they were having sex together. Keohane himself was pleasant to Christopher but not particularly friendly; he seemed unaware of the situation which his presence created. He was a slim, well-built young man, a bit on the skinny side, fairly good-looking, with a mustache.
Christopher found him neither charming nor amusing and quite
unattractive sexually. As Christopher might have foreseen if he could have looked at the affair objectively, Caskey soon lost interest in Keohane, deciding that he had changed since the old days and was now turning into a queen. As for Keohane himself, this reunion with Caskey probably hadn’t meant all that much to him, even at the beginning, and he could get all the sex he wanted elsewhere. The two of them parted on friendly terms.
But, if Keohane had deflated Christopher’s ego, it was soon
[* Not his real name.]
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Lost Years
reinflated by John Cowan. All of a sudden, Cowan began to show a desire for Christopher’s company. The two of them would lie talking on the beach, passing back and forth a bottle of mixed gin (or was it vodka?) and fruit juice. Christopher liked being with Cowan. Quite aside from his physical beauty, he was very entertaining, a hippie born before his time, a great talker, full of quotations from books he had read, stories of people he had met, charmingly irresponsible and cheerful. He flattered Christopher, asking him questions about Life, Eternity and God––treated him, in fact, as a guru. And then, one day, when they were at least halfway through their bottle, Cowan
announced that there was someone in the Canyon he could really fall in love with, someone he would like to live with, if only that person were free. “Who is it?” Christopher asked. Cowan answered, “You.”
Christopher was overwhelmed, dazzled, delighted. To him,
Cowan was now The Blond––more completely so than Bill Harris
had ever been. And The Blond had chosen him! It was a mythic kind of honor, like being chosen by a Greek god as his human lover.
Without doubt, Cowan was full of blarney and capable of saying anything which came into his beautiful head; Christopher knew this, but it didn’t spoil his pleasure. For Cowan hadn’t spoken as Cowan but as The Blond; and, in the myth world, the words of a god must always come true. It was in the myth world only that Christopher wanted Cowan; the idea of leaving Caskey and setting up housekeeping with Cowan in the everyday world was ridiculous. This Cowan probably understood, as clearly as Christopher did. They went to bed together once––in the garage apartment, one night when Caskey was out on the town. I think Christopher fucked
Cowan, but I’m not sure. What remains is simply the sense of having taken part in a magic act, an act of intense excitement and delight––
which nevertheless didn’t ever have to be repeated, because it was essentially symbolic.
Sometime in 1946, Hayden Lewis started what was to be a long-
lasting relationship with a young man named Rodney Owens. Rod was tall, dark, slender and very good-looking. He was also quite intelligent, funny, campy, charming and eager to be friendly. He and Christopher took to each other from the start––indeed, Rod used to tell Christopher later that he would have wanted to have an affair with him if he hadn’t met Hayden first. The arrival of Rod improved relations between Hayden and Christopher, though it
didn’t remove their underlying antipathy. And Christopher had to admit that, for a while at least, Rod made Hayden nicer; they were desperately in love with each other and, during the first months, ¾ 1946 ¾
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couldn’t bear to be parted even for a couple of days.
As far as I remember, Hayden and Rod went into business to-
gether quite soon after they met. They made ceramics––chiefly or entirely ashtrays––first in their home and later at a small workshop with several assistants. Rod proved to be an efficient businessman. In the course of a few years they became comparatively well-off.
Christopher and Caskey sometimes visited the Manns during 1946, at their Pacific Palisades house. I have a clear memory of Thomas holding forth with his urbane pedantry and good humor, smoking one of his big cigars. The extremely serious operation on his lung––Christopher was given to understand that it might be cancer, but apparently it wasn’t––seemed merely a momentary interruption of Thomas’s work––an interruption which Thomas refused to take seriously. By early June, he was back home safe from the Chicago hospital, still shaky, no doubt, but very much his former reassuring cigar-smoking self. Christopher loved him for his toughness. He had simply made up his mind not to die before his novel was finished. In fact, he lived for another nine years, finished Dr. Faustus and wrote three more novels.1
Toward the end of the summer, the question of Christopher’s citizenship came up again. I believe there had been a test case related to citizenship for pacifists which was decided favorably by the Supreme Court––anyhow, the regulations had been to some extent relaxed. So Christopher was examined and his case investigated, for the second time. I remember a hearing at which he was asked if he would be prepared to load ships in wartime. “Yes,” he said, “if they were carrying food.” “But not if they were carrying arms?” “No––not if they were carrying arms.” “Suppose, for the sake of argument, the cargo was entirely foodstuff except for one rifle?” Christopher looked at the questioner for a moment and then said, “Honestly!” This made them all laugh. Later, it was decided to grant his application––the decisive point in his favor being that he had actually volunteered for noncombatant service in the Medical Corps while the war was still on; he was over military age at the time and knew that the age limit was most unlikely to be raised again, but that didn’t matter!
1 December 20, 1975. Since writing the above, I have read Katia Mann’s Unwritten Memories, in which it is stated that Thomas did indeed have a malignant growth; the specialist told this to Katia, who did not tell Thomas.
Thomas never had any subsequent trouble with his lung, although one and a half lobes had been removed from it. He had no recurrence of cancer. He died of arteriosclerosis.
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Lost Years
So, on November 8, Christopher went to the court downtown to
be made a citizen. Peggy Kiskadden insisted on coming with him, as a sort of godmother. They found themselves part of a crowd of several hundred people––a number of them presumably pacifists, since this was (I’m fairly sure) the first opportunity for a pacifist to become a citizen, in the Los Angeles area. Because of the crowd, Christopher couldn’t see the judge and could hardly even hear him.
And now, after all his protests and explanations, he found himself required to take the ordinary oath of allegiance, without any modi-fication whatever. He did so, reflecting that his objection to it was already a matter of record. After the ceremony, he used the privilege of a newly made citizen of the U.S. to rid himself legally forever of his two middle names.
This day, November 8, was also the sixth anniversary of
Christopher’s initiation by Prabhavananda. And it was to be the day of the first opening of I Am a Camera, out of town, at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951.
Late in December 1946, Christopher and Caskey flew down to
Mexico City to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve. They visited the pyramids of Teotihuacán, Cholula, Puebla and a little town called Tepoztlán (maybe it’s big and well known, nowadays) on a side road off the main highway to Cuernavaca. Tepoztlán impressed