Helmuth Roder and Fritz Mosel.2 I am pretty sure that there were at least a couple of dozen neighborhood gays who were on call when they entertained.
1 While writing this ( July 26, 1972) I heard John Huston in a TV interview say that he’d seen Truman beat Humphrey Bogart at arm wrestling, when they were working on Beat the Devil. Huston described Truman as “a power-house.”
2 I don’t remember anything about the doings of Helmuth (Hellmuth?) and Fritz during this visit. They are mentioned in the 1939 journal, when they were in Hollywood. Helmuth changed his name from Schroeder to Roder after coming to the U.S. Christopher had had a brief affair with him in the old Berlin days––succeeding Stephen Spender, with whom Helmuth had had a much longer affair which ended badly but at least inspired Stephen’s story “The Burning Cactus” and, I believe, his poems beginning “After success, your little afternoon success,” and “Alas, when he laughs, it is not he / But a shopkeeper, who scrapes his hands and bows.” [Spender added a title, “Helmut,” when he later reprinted this early poem; but in letters to Schroeder he spelled the name
“Hellmut.”] Now I come to think of it, I’m nearly certain that the episode in The World in the Evening, when Mariano Galdós says to Elizabeth, “Bleiben Sie liegen,” is based on the actual first meeting of Christopher and Helmuth. (See part two, chapter four.)
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Andrew Lyndon was a longtime intimate friend of Truman’s.
They were both from the South; Andrew’s hometown was Macon,
Georgia. He was slim, soft-spoken, brown eyed, attractively monkey faced, capable of bitchery and probably of cruelty; quite a southern belle. Harold Halma was good looking and well built and much
more masculine; a weaker, nicer character. He was a photographer.
Andrew worked in a bookshop. They had an apartment in New
York. I don’t remember how long they had been living together, but their affair was already on the rocks––that is to say, Harold was still very much in love with Andrew but Andrew had lost interest.
Caskey and Christopher saw Leo Lerman and his guests every day (it appears) during their stay in Nantucket. They had meals together or cycled or went swimming. (The current that swept around that part of the island made swimming exciting but safe; you could float and let yourself be carried by it, very fast and as far as you liked, without ever being taken out of your depth.)
Almost instantly, Andrew Lyndon started to get a crush on
Christopher. Christopher, as usual, was flattered and didn’t discourage him. Truman encouraged Andrew strongly, out of mischief. Leo was voyeuristically entertained. Harold was jealous. Caskey wasn’t; he didn’t even resent Truman’s effort to promote the affair––knowing, no doubt, that Christopher wasn’t serious. And indeed nothing much happened between Christopher and Andrew––there was so
little opportunity for them to be alone together, even for a minute.
One afternoon, Truman, Andrew and Christopher went swimming
in a lagoon, where boats were moored. Andrew, maybe hoping to start something, stripped off his trunks and put them on the deck of one of the boats. Truman promptly grabbed them and swam away
––but not far enough to allow Andrew and Christopher any privacy.
Only on the last night, when Leo gave a party and the lights were turned out so they could play hide-and-seek, did Andrew and
Christopher manage to kiss and grope each other in the dark, but even this was quickly interrupted by Harold.
Next day, July 20, Caskey and Christopher returned by steamer to New Bedford, where they had left their car, and started for Cape Cod. They arrived at Provincetown on July 21.
Paul Cadmus and his current boyfriend George Tooker, Jared
French and his wife were staying at Provincetown for the
summer. So were Don Windham and Sandy Campbell. Caskey and
Christopher saw all of them but not, I think, together. Maybe Paul wasn’t on speaking terms with Don and Sandy––for Sandy had been Paul’s lover and Don had taken Sandy away from him.
All I remember of this visit are two days on the beach with Paul, 128
Lost Years
Jared and George. It was a beautiful beach and quite secluded; they all swam and lay in the sun bare-ass––until suddenly a sightseeing jeep full of women would come plunging out of the woods, so fast that there was no time to cover yourself with a towel, even; all you could do was roll over on your belly and let them try not to stare at your buttocks. Another, more constant threat on this beach were the stinging flies. The New Yorkers took these as a matter of course, but they made Christopher and Caskey realize how lucky bathers are in California the (almost) Bugless.
Jared French took a lot of nude photographs of Caskey and
Christopher. When these were printed, both of them looked ridiculous––partly because their worst physical features (the bandiness of Caskey’s legs, the narrowness of Christopher’s shoulders) had been unintentionally emphasized; partly because they had been so stupidly posed. Considering that Jared was an artist, he was a surprisingly poor photographer. Or was he merely inhibited by a private misgiving?
Having suggested taking these pictures, did he suddenly feel that he didn’t really know Caskey and Christopher well enough? This would explain an oddness which was apparent in nearly every photograph; the distance between the two figures was wrong. As a pair of lovers, Christopher and Caskey should have been closer together; as non-lovers who happened to be stark naked, they were too close. And what were they up to, why had they taken off their clothes, if not to fuck? They seemed hardly conscious of each other’s presence, dully awaiting some cue or command to move, like animals whose actions are discontinuous and unrelated. The funniest picture showed
Caskey halfway up a ladder; he looked as if he had already forgotten why he had started to climb it. Christopher stood below, ignoring him, with an expression of irritable uneasiness. . . .[*] Jared apologized for the pictures and blamed the camera. Christopher and Caskey called them “hippos mating.”1
On July 26, Caskey and Christopher drove back to New York.
1 The vicious tone of this whole paragraph suggests that there is still some soreness in this twenty-five-year-old wound to Christopher’s vanity! But, aside from this, I now see that my condemnation of Jared French as a photographer is unfair by any standards. It wasn’t incompetence that made Jared pose Christopher and Caskey in the way he did. He must have known exactly what he was doing, for the figures in many of his paintings of that period are posed in just the same style.
[* This may be the photograph which appears in David Leddick, Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935‒1955 (Universe Publishing, 1997), p. 84, and which belonged to Paul Cadmus and John Andersson. Isherwood destroyed his own copies of French’s photographs in 1957 or 1958.]
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On July 30, Caskey and Christopher had lunch with Anne, one of Caskey’s two sisters. I can’t now remember if this was the sister he disliked less or more than the other; he was basically hostile to both of them. I suppose Caskey had to entertain Anne as long as she was visiting New York; this would explain why he didn’t accompany Christopher and Lincoln Kirstein on a visit to Auden and Chester
[Kallman] on Fire Island that day.
Auden had taken a house in Cherry Grove for the summer, and
Christopher had already been to see him there twice, with Caskey, during June. The house, like most of the others in Cherry Grove, was just a wooden shack. Its window screens were rusted by the sea air, and, since Auden and Chester were the housekeepers, flies buzzed over unwashed dishes, uncollected garbage, unmade beds with dirty sheets and a vast litter of books and papers. Neither of them was at all interested in the ocean or the beach as such. Auden spent most of his time indoors, Chester went out chiefly to cruise the population, which was wild and barred no holds. The one little hotel was jumping. Every time the ferry boat crossed the sound from the mainland to the island, a big crowd of residents would be awaiting it, on the lookout for new faces. Guitars twanged, wolf whistles and gay repartee were exchanged. The passengers were eager for the adventures ahead; they stared boldly at strangers who had taken their fancy. This was Watteau’s Cythera brought up to date—only it was an arrival at, not an “Embarkation for.” At night, the noise from the bar could be heard all over the colony, and couples stumbled out of it and threw themselves down to screw on the sand, scarcely beyond the range of the house lights. No doubt the minority of elderly square homeowners objected strongly to all this, but at that time the only curb on sex activity was an ordinance which put the sand dunes out of bounds––not for moral reasons but because, in the hurricane of 1938(?),[*] the dunes had been the only remaining refuge when huge waves washed over that part of the island; if the dunes were to get trampled flat by would-be fuckers and another hurricane were to hit Cherry Grove, all its inhabitants might be drowned.