For some reason, the keep-out sign outside the exit door hadn’t been switched on, so Christopher was in constant danger of interruption. Once, just as his signal light flashed, the exit door opened and a young carpenter came in. There was no time for explanations.
178
Lost Years
Christopher fixed the carpenter with an authoritative glare and told him accusingly: “And they divided my garments among them––and they cast dice for my robe.” When telling this story later, Christopher used to say the young man looked panic-stricken, fearing that he was confronted by a religious maniac. I doubt this. What does strike me now, as I write it down, is––how beautifully suitable it was that the young man should have been a carpenter!
On February 12, Christopher finished chapter eight.
On February 21, he went to the Good Samaritan Hospital, to
watch Bill Kiskadden operate. Christopher’s relations with Bill had always been somewhat strained. He sensed (and was later told
definitely by other people) that Bill didn’t like him. I think Bill was even physically repelled by Christopher, finding him creepy, unnatural, a faggot. But Bill and Christopher had to keep on polite terms with each other as long as Christopher went on seeing Peggy.
They both worked quite hard at this, and they found a topic for communication in Christopher’s amateur interest in medicine. So Bill invited Christopher to come and see him at work. It was a challenge maybe, from Bill’s point of view; he may have thought that Christopher would either back out or turn squeamish and have to leave the operating room. Christopher had no such qualms. Having seen a leg amputated, an abdomen slit open and a skull trephined, he was convinced that no surgical sight could upset him.
But there is something uncomfortably personal about plastic
surgery on the face; it is only too easy to identify with the patient. So Christopher did feel squeamish two or three times that morning, though he didn’t give Bill satisfaction by showing it.
The patient was a truck driver––Bill Kiskadden didn’t as a rule do cosmetic operations; he repaired the victims of industrial accidents and car wrecks. This man had been driving his truck somewhere up in the mountains when an emergency arose which
forced him to choose between colliding with a small car full of people and swinging his truck off the road into a steep slope. He swung off the road and the truck turned over and his face was smashed against the steering wheel. Now Bill Kiskadden was
working to get his nose back into its proper position; it had been knocked crooked. The patient was completely conscious.
Christopher felt a qualm as Bill took a hypodermic and very slowly and deliberately sank its needle into the tip of the truck driver’s nose. The truck driver uttered a groan and exclaimed that it hurt.
“I know it hurts,” Bill told him, “it hurts like hell. That’s what you get for being a brave man.” Bill said this in a nice friendly doctor-to-patient tone––and yet there was something about the look on ¾ 1949 ¾
179
his face which convinced Christopher that what Gerald Heard had always maintained was true: Bill was a sadist.1
At this point there is a group of four more entries in the 1948–1956
journal, on February 20, March 1, March 2 and March 3. They refer to the Ramakrishna birthday puja at the Vedanta Center which
Christopher attended and a party he and Caskey went to at Thomas Mann’s house (both on March 1). Also (March 2) to Christopher’s difficulties in starting chapter ten of the South American book––he had finished chapter nine on February 24. There is also a reference to Peter Watson who was then in Los Angeles with his friend
Norman Fowler; Christopher and Caskey had been seeing a lot of them.
Christopher doesn’t say anything in the day-to-day diary about his work with Swami on Patanjali’s yoga aphorisms––translation and commentary––which was later to be published as How to Know God.
However, in the March 2 entry in the journal, he writes: “Swami’s way ahead of me,” which shows that they must have been working together for some time already.
The only really significant feature of these entries is that they twice mention the difficulties Christopher is having with Caskey. This is the first time that Christopher has even admitted in writing that there are any difficulties and his tone suggests that he is trying hard to minimize them. Indeed he presents the whole problem as though it were a mere lack of consideration by Caskey for Christopher’s comfort and convenience. Christopher complains that Caskey stays up, from time to time, playing the record player all night––it seems that this usually happens when they have had a party and Caskey is drunk. Christopher writes:
It is a most curious deadlock––arising, apparently, out of an emotional blind spot in Caskey. He absolutely cannot understand why I mind being kept awake. And I absolutely cannot understand how he can keep me awake, even if he doesn’t understand why.
However, I freely admit that I am kept awake by a kind of
1 Gerald Heard used to tell how, while he was visiting the Kiskaddens, Bill had noticed a wart on his finger and had told him, “I can cure that right away.” He had then produced several needles and had stuck them into Gerald’s wart. Then he had heated the needles with a match. The pain, Gerald said, was extreme––adding that Bill had watched his face all the time, waiting for him to betray his suffering. But Gerald, being Gerald, didn’t––so Bill was foiled.
Bill must have had much more fun when he cut out Christopher’s pile (see the journal entry of April 24, 1944) because Christopher “yelled clear around the block.”
180
Lost Years
obstinacy––just as it is obstinacy which makes him play the
records.
It is only in the last sentence that Christopher hints at the basic hostility between Caskey and himself; the clash of their wills. The standing argument over Caskey’s midnight record playing was simply one expression of this. Caskey’s and Christopher’s wills had always clashed (see pages 52‒53) but the clash was now becoming much more destructive. Now that they had settled into a relatively permanent home, they had no prospect of change or travel to divert them, no move to New York or trip around South America. Neither of them could say to himself, “I’ll put up with this, because it won’t be for long.” Now they had to face the question, “What kind of a life are we going to have together––for the next five, ten, twenty years?”
As far as Christopher was concerned, the answer was, “I want to have a comfortable, predictable, fairly quiet daily life, in which my mind will be as free from anxiety as possible and I shall be able to work. I want sex, of course, with Caskey but I won’t be unreasonably jealous if he runs around with other people––especially if he does it elsewhere, because then I’ll be able to bring my own boys back here and screw them comfortably at home. I don’t care much for parties but I’m prepared to give them from time to time,
especially if Caskey makes all the arrangements and does all the cooking and we don’t have to stay up too late. Oh sure, I’ll help with the dishwashing if necessary. As for Caskey himself, I want him to be happy and busy (at something, never mind what) and to go to bed and wake up at the same time I do.”
Caskey didn’t see things in this way, at all. He didn’t want his life to be predictable. He wanted surprises, unexpected guests, parties which snowballed into roaring crowds, out-of-town trips taken on the spur of the moment. He would tidy the house one day and
drunkenly wreck it the next. He was ready to work for hours on any project which interested him, but he hated the concept of work for work’s sake and he couldn’t understand Christopher’s compulsive need to be busy. He may well have begun to feel, already, that by coming back to live with Christopher in California he had walked into a trap.