16 To be fair, I must add that Salka herself, in her autobiography The Kindness of Strangers, mentions Christopher’s move into her garage apartment but says nothing about Caskey. Is this discretion or snobbery? Probably a mixture.
17 There was another literary project on which Christopher must have worked during 1946—a translation of Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination which Swami Prabhavananda made and Christopher polished. The book was published in 1947, which means that Christopher must have finished work on it before he left for England in January. I’m sure he didn’t take it with him.
When I think of Christopher at work on the language of Shankara’s brutally uncompromising opening statements, I realize what a profound conflict they must have stirred up in his own subconscious mind:
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.)
[18 “The Emigration,” in D1.]
19 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.
20 This article was published in Harper’s Bazaar, January 1952.
[21 “High Valley Theatre,” Vol. 31, No. 6, pp. 64–6.]
[22 Translated from Noé (1931) by André Obey.]
[23 Not his real name.]
24 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.
[25 After the volcano; see below.]
1947
THE 1947 DAY-TO-DAY diary records that Caskey and Christopher left Mexico City by plane at 6:00 a.m. on January 1; I’m not sure how long the flight to Los Angeles would have taken, according to schedule. Their first stop was at Guadalajara. On the way there, they got a glimpse of the real Paricutín, then a very young and notorious volcano (not quite four years old), smoking furiously. Between Guadalajara and Mazatlán, the plane was caught in a thunderstorm over the mountains and tossed about. I don’t know how much danger it really was in, but the situation seemed very alarming—because of the flashes of lightning, the bumps and sideslips, the glimpses of rock through the clouds, immediately below, the cries of passengers and the falling of baggage from the racks (in which it should never have been stowed, anyway). At first, Christopher was only anxious—thanks to the dullness which remained from last night’s drinking and to the presence of Caskey beside him. (For Caskey was a seasoned veteran of the air. While in the navy, he had gone out on weather planes as an observer and had once circled down over a hurricane.) But now, glancing at him for reassurance, Christopher saw that he too was anxious and maybe even scared—it made him look sulky. Immediately, Christopher became terrified. And, after this experience, he lost confidence permanently. He has never felt at ease in any plane from that day to this.
When they reached Mazatlán, they were told that the plane had engine trouble—presumably because of the beating it had taken in the storm—and that there would be a delay. They stayed there most of the day, then made a slow calm flight up the western coast, stopping at Hermosillo and Mexicali. They didn’t arrive at Los Angeles till midnight.
Christopher now had less than three weeks before his departure for England. I imagine that he must have been in a considerable flap about this trip and more than half dreading the prospect of it. But such emotions are quickly forgotten. The day-to-day diary is full of names of people he saw—I no longer remember who some of them were. [Bertolt] Brecht (whom he now definitely didn’t like) is mentioned, Hayden and Rod Owens, van Druten and Walter Starcke, the Beesleys and their friend Phyllis Morris,1 Cyril Connolly (who must then have been almost at the end of his visit to the U.S.), Charles and Oona Chaplin, Chris Wood, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Jay, Bo and Kelley, Iris Tree, Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, the van Leydens, Tim Brooke, Nicky Nadeau, John Mace. There was also Swami, whom Christopher visited several times, taking part in the Vivekananda Puja on January 13.
Sometime toward the end of 1946, Christopher started working with Lesser Samuels on a treatment for a movie story. The story was originally Samuels’s idea and I don’t think Christopher contributed much to it—it wasn’t at all his sort of subject matter. But Samuels was fond of Christopher and evidently got some kind of psychological support from collaborating with him. The story was about a young iceman who invents one of the first automatic refrigerators and a girl art student who falls for him and does a painting of his head attached to a nearly nude body she has copied from a Michelangelo print, thus causing a scandal. Period, the early nineteen hundreds. Samuels gave it the title Judgement Day in Pittsburgh. They finished it on January 6.
On January 17, Salka gave a farewell dinner for Christopher, to which the Huxleys, the Kiskaddens, John van Druten, Phyllis Morris and Garbo came. Garbo may have made this social appearance as a gesture of friendship toward Christopher, or because Aldous and Maria wer
e invited. I don’t remember anything about the evening—no doubt Aldous gave his expected performance, Peggy was bright with Maria, Bill was courtly with Salka, Phyllis was thrilled to be in such grand company, John was watching Garbo and wondering what she was thinking and what he was thinking about her.
Among the final preparations for Christopher’s journey was a visit to the British Consulate downtown, also on the 17th. Although Christopher had already travelled on his U.S. passport to Mexico, he still couldn’t quite see himself as an American citizen. He found it strange and slightly disagreeable to face the fact that he now needed a visa before he could set foot in England.
January 18: “Saw Swami for breakfast. Tea with Beesleys. Supper with Bill at Romanoff’s.” These were, so to speak, the last rites. Christopher had to get Swami’s blessing—all the more so because of the guilt which he still felt toward him (and would feel for many years to come). He had to see the Beesleys, because they were to be his “audience” on this trip—far more than any of his other friends, they could imagine how he would feel on his return to England, they would identify with him in his adventures there and wait eagerly to hear about them. He and Bill Caskey had to have their Last Supper at Romanoff’s because it had become their luxury symbol during the past months. They very seldom indulged in the extravagance of eating there, but they would sometimes drink at its bar and watch the celebrities.2
January 19 was the anniversary of Auden’s and Christopher’s departure for China in 1938 and of their departure from England for the U.S. in 1939. It’s possible that Christopher deliberately fixed this same date for his return journey—I’m not sure, but it would have been like him to do so; that was his kind of superstitiousness. Salka shed her easily provoked Jewish-Slavic tears when they said goodbye.3 Christopher cried too. And at the airport there was another big goodbye scene. He hugged Hayden and Rod as well as Caskey and strode away with restrained pathos to board the plane. But there was a hitch. For some reason, the passengers were told to leave it again; so Christopher came back and rejoined the others. He fancied, rightly or wrongly, that this anticlimax pleased Hayden—that Hayden enjoyed his slight embarrassment at having to stick around talking until the plane was ready and then make a hopelessly undramatic second exit. By the time he took off, it was about 5:30 p.m.
This was the first and shortest of three delays on Christopher’s journey. The second was caused by bad weather; Christopher’s plane had to land at Buffalo and Christopher had to travel down to New York on the train. He finally arrived there at 8:45 p.m. on the 20th. Auden and Chester Kallman put him up for the night at their apartment. Next day, he left New York at 1:00 p.m. for England, via Gander and Shannon airports. At Shannon there was a third delay of about six hours. He reached London (Bovingdon Airport) at 5:00 in the evening of January 22, and it must have taken him at least another two hours to get to John Lehmann’s house in South Kensington.4
Christopher wrote an account of this journey a few weeks later in letter form, calling it “A Letter from England.” He sent it to Harper’s Bazaar but they didn’t want to publish it. Ten years later, he revised it, for a series of articles John Lehmann had planned, called Coming to London. “Coming to London”[5] was reprinted in Exhumations.
My memories of the reunion with Morgan Forster, Bob Buckingham, Joe Ackerley, William Plomer etc., at John’s, that first evening, are dim—I’m not even sure who was actually present, for more meetings took place during the days following and all are blurred into each other. I do remember6 Peter Viertel being there (with Jigee, I think)—and that Christopher was keenly aware of his presence as the only outside observer of Christopher’s welcome home. Lehmann, in The Ample Proposition, says that Christopher was “nervous about the way he would be received.” This is probably true, up to a point—but it is also true that Lehmann would tend to overestimate the degree of Christopher’s nervousness. Lehmann, in his heart, felt that Christopher ought to be nervous and penitent, because he hadn’t stayed in wartime England—and, incidentally, been available to help Lehmann with his publishing projects.
Lehmann now obviously saw himself as having been a quite important part of the war effort on the home front—and Christopher was willing to offer him all the respect he demanded, being now doubly a guest, in Lehmann’s house and on Lehmann’s island. Lehmann was, and always had been, a bit of a pompous ass with delusions of importance, but Christopher saw how vulnerable he still was, how insecurely assertive of his mediocre talent. Christopher remembered how Auden had once parodied Yeats’s line, “Had even O’Duffy—but I name no more—“[7] as “Had even Lehmann—” As long as he could laugh at Lehmann—and that would be always—Christopher could go on being fond of him.
None of Christopher’s other friends showed the least sign of requiring his penitence. If they thought of him as having deserted them in their hour of need, they never let him guess it. Neither then nor at any later time was Christopher aware of receiving any insult or snub, direct or indirect, from anybody he met in England.
After Lehmann had shown Christopher to his bedroom, that first night, and left him to undress and go to bed, a strange thing happened; Christopher became aware that he was quite violently homesick. This wasn’t a disguised longing to be with Caskey and it wasn’t specifically related to California or any other part of the States that he knew—it was simply a sudden hunger for the taste of something American; even a hamburger might have satisfied it—except that he couldn’t stand hamburgers. As it was, Christopher hunted around Lehmann’s bookshelves and found a book which seemed to be exactly what he had been hungry for: An American Tragedy. For hours he lay greedily rereading Dreiser and loving, as never before, the look of American place-names and words. . . . This experience was never repeated. While in England on this and later visits, Christopher felt homesick now and then, but in a different, more usual way; he simply wished he were back in Santa Monica.
On January 238 Christopher went to the branch of the Westminster Bank at which he had had an account since the 1930s. To his delight and amazement, he found that the interest on his deposit had built it up, through these eight years, to a total of more than a thousand pounds. The bank manager was worried about this, because the account now belonged to a citizen of a foreign country and ought to be declared as such to the Bank of England, in accordance with new regulations. The manager frankly didn’t want to be involved in so much paperwork. And he took it for granted that Christopher would rather not be billed for delinquent income tax. He therefore urged Christopher, in tactful roundabout language, to please withdraw and spend his money as quickly as he conveniently could—so that he, the manager, might officially forget it had ever existed.
Christopher was quite ready to do this. Since he wasn’t allowed to take the money out of the country and put it into an American savings account, it could only be used for entertaining and giving presents to himself and others. This was enjoyable. Christopher’s friends were pleased and amused by his extravagance but not embarrassed—for after all he was a Yank now and one expected Yanks to be rich and generous. But, with the best will in the world, Christopher couldn’t get rid of his money as fast as the bank manager would have liked; the last of it wasn’t spent until his third visit to England in 1951.
Speaking of Christopher as a Yank gets me onto the subject of his accent. Lehmann writes (in The Ample Proposition) that Christopher perhaps didn’t realize how much his accent and some of his mannerisms had changed, since they had last seen him. Christopher says nothing about this in his “Letter from England” article, although he dwells on the absurdity, to his ears, of the British accent: “Surely, I thought, they are doing it on purpose?”
It now seems clear to me that it was Christopher who was “doing it on purpose.” I suppose he had tried, more or less consciously, to adapt his speech to western American, ever since his arrival in California. But he hadn’t succeeded in doing much beyond altering his vowels; his speech rhythms remained British. When he spoke in publ
ic, ladies would beg him never to lose “that lovely English lilt”—which annoyed him, of course. The only result of his efforts to acquire a “new voice” was that Americans often took him for an Australian! As the years passed, and Christopher settled down in his adopted environment, he had gradually relaxed and stopped caring how he sounded.
But the return to England presented another kind of challenge. In California, Christopher had felt challenged to conform; now he felt challenged to be different. He had to prove to the English that his emigration had been a serious action, that he had put down roots and become, at least partially, American. (To prove, in other words, that he had deliberately changed countries, not merely run away from home.) Christopher, being what he was—a born playactor—could only express all this by thinking himself into an Anglo-American persona, expressly designed for his English audience, complete with accent and mannerisms. This persona was usually accepted at its face value by strangers during Christopher’s first postwar visits to England. Shopkeepers would often ask him, “Staying over here long, sir?” A girl at the office where he got his food-ration coupons said sweetly, “It seems so silly to have to call Americans aliens.” Friends tended to be amused or slightly skeptical, however. Lehmann notes that, “These changes did not [. . .] show themselves continuously,” and adds, “I had the impression [. . .] that he was, in spirit, being pulled to and fro across the Atlantic all the time.” Forster used to laugh at Christopher affectionately for pronouncing Bob Buckingham’s name as “Barb.”
In the article, Christopher writes about London’s shabbiness—the peeling plaster, the faded paint on buildings, wallpaper hanging in tatters from the walls of the Reform Club, pictures still absent in storage from the National Gallery, a once fashionable restaurant (Boulestin’s[9]) reduced to “a dingy squalid hash joint.” But I don’t think “shabbiness” is an adequate word. It now seems to me that Christopher’s impressions went in much deeper. Indeed, he quotes William Plomer’s remark, “This is a dying city.” Plomer was wrong, historically speaking, but he was right in suggesting that postwar London gave you a sharp reminder of mortality—all the more so if you had just arrived from Los Angeles.
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