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And now The Condor and the Cows takes over. The doings of
Christopher and Caskey are described in it, more or less, up to March 27, 1948, when they left Buenos Aires on a French ship called the Groix, bound for France, via Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Dakar.
1948
The 1948–1956 journal[*] begins with an entry on April 11, 1948, written on board the Groix, the day before they landed at Dakar.
It is a pity that Christopher didn’t begin earlier and include a description of April 1, the day they spent ashore in Rio as the guests of [some acquaintances]. I still faintly remember the first glimpse of that fantastic coastline––Christopher’s delighted incredulity as the harbor mouth and the Sugar Loaf came into view and he said to himself, “It’s not true, I don’t believe it!” (Five years later, Christopher felt the same thing when he got his first sight of Monument Valley.1) [One of the acquaintances] was an obsessive sexualist; he kept a chart showing the number of boys he had sex with each month and how many orgasms he had with each. He
and [his companion] were superhosts; after driving Caskey and Christopher all around the city and giving them a magnificent lunch, they brought them back to [his] apartment where an incredibly handsome youth was waiting. I think he was Japanese-Irish-Negro, such blends being fairly common in Rio. Christopher and Caskey had a hasty conference, since it was obvious that good guestmanship required one of them to go to bed with him. Caskey said Christopher Burnett by the Beesleys, who adored her. Christopher admired her then as I admire her now––neither more nor less. It is delightful to visit her in her elegantly, ironically furnished literary mansion; but she never lets you see what’s outside it. Christopher had hated The Rock Pool when he first read it, in the thirties. Rereading it in 1947 he loved it, and has loved it ever since. His early dislike of it was probably due to left-wing snobbery. He was quite certain that he knew what kind of a book Connolly ought to write, and this wasn’t it. It wasn’t socially conscious––or rather, it didn’t deal with the kind of characters you were supposed to be socially conscious about.
1 Nevertheless, the two experiences were essentially different. Rio inspired an aesthetic excitement, Monument Valley [in northeast Arizona and southeast Utah] a primitive religious awe.
[* “The Postwar Years” in D 1.]
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Lost Years
should do it. Left alone with the boy, Christopher was embarrassed at first, chiefly by his fixed though not necessarily hostile scowl and his disinclination to talk even Portuguese (of which Christopher remembered anyhow only a few words). Christopher tried to excite him by sucking, licking and biting but without apparent success
––until the boy suddenly turned Christopher over, greased his ass, got an entirely convincing hard-on and fucked him slowly and most satisfactorily.
The journal entries of April 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, and 20 describe the increasing discomforts of the overcrowded ship and Caskey’s and Christopher’s consequent Francophobia. Caskey was even more
emphatic than Christopher about this; his attitude was so evident that the French passengers didn’t dare kidnap him, as they did Christopher, to take part in the line-crossing ceremony and get daubed with flour and water and dunked.[*] But Caskey nevertheless condescended to go up on the boat deck every night with a French beau. They only kissed, because the Frenchman was so afraid of being caught if they started any serious sex making.
On April 22, they disembarked at Le Havre and went on by train to Paris, where they stayed a week––visiting Denny Fouts, running into Auden and Chester Kallman and also meeting Gore Vidal for the first time, quite by chance. These happenings are pretty well covered in the journal. Relations between Denny and Caskey were
adequately polite but tense underneath––I dimly remember a semi-quarrel between Christopher and Denny on their last evening (the 29th); I think it was because Denny had casually suggested that Caskey should take some money and pick up a packet of opium from a “connection” who was waiting outside the restaurant. Christopher found this outrageous and refused to let Caskey go, saying that the police might well be watching the pusher, in which case Caskey would get arrested. If my memory is correct, Denny’s suggestion was an entirely characteristic act of aggression. (An altogether different but recognizable version of this scene appears in “Paul.”[†]) This was their last meeting with Denny; he died at the end of that year. Shortly after Christopher had left Paris, Denny sent him one of his sour-sweet little letters, saying, “I hope you and Billy will go on being as happy as you seem to be.” Denny obviously didn’t hope it.
Christopher’s journal entries don’t betray the fact that he found Gore Vidal sexually attractive, and that Gore was flirting with him.
[* Travellers crossing the equator for the first time are tried at a mock “Court of Neptune” and subjected to joke punishments.]
[† In Down There on a Visit.]
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On April 29, Gore asked Christopher to come and have breakfast with him at his hotel. (I don’t remember how Gore avoided inviting Caskey but he did, and this was probably one of the causes of the hostility which soon developed between them.) Just as Christopher was walking along the corridor toward Gore’s room, its door flew open and a young man ran out, collided with Christopher and
dashed past him to the staircase. Gore laughingly explained that there had been a misunderstanding. When Christopher’s arrival was
announced on the house telephone, Gore had told the young man
––with whom he had spent the night––“Mon ami vient.”[*] The
young man had taken it for granted that the “ami” was an enraged lover, so he had jumped into his clothes and tried to escape. Gore received Christopher sitting in bed in his underclothes. Later, when he got out to go to the bathroom, Christopher saw that he had very sexy legs. They flirted all through breakfast, but neither was about to make the first move, so nothing happened.