Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  Back in Berlin, in 1929, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft had classified Christopher as “infantile,” sexually speaking. This was perceptive. For Christopher then was and has since remained very much under the spell of his prepub[escent] sexual experiences at St. Edmund’s School.3 If he wasn’t quite infantile he was definitely inclined to be small-boyish. At St. Edmund’s, all of his orgasms with other boys had been while wrestling. (The other boys were probably having orgasms too, but he couldn’t be sure because they always had some clothes on.) Auden and Christopher must have wrestled, during their sex acts. (Detailed memories of sex with Auden—which went on intermittently from 1926 to 1938—are strangely dim, perhaps because Christopher had to make a mental blackout, switching himself back from a grown-up man to a twelve year old, before getting into bed with him.) When Christopher entered the world of the Berlin hustlers in 1929 and found himself able to act out any sex fantasy which appealed to him, he always wanted to wrestle naked; nothing else excited him as much. Boxing excited him, too; he had a fetishistic attitude to boxing gloves. Many of his obliging young sex partners found all this perfectly natural. (This sort of sub-sadistic sexual violence—which also includes mild nonbrutal beatings with a leather strap—seems to suit the German temperament.) A boy who was basically heterosexual would sometimes suggest wrestling of his own accord, get violently aroused during the fight and have more than one orgasm. Later, he would excuse his pleasure by saying that it was something you couldn’t do with a girl, something for men only—and therefore, he implied, the only nonperverse homosexual act. When Christopher was taken to Matty’s Cell House[4] in New York in 1938, he asked to be introduced to a German-American boy—meaning that he hoped for a reasonable facsimile of a Berlin hustler. Thus he met [one boy who,] oddly enough, despite his hangups and considerable sexual selfishness, [. . .] did prove to be “German” in his tastes. He was always eager to wrestle and box. But Christopher now wanted to be fucked or fuck after wrestling, and [the boy] refused to do this. He only liked fucking teenagers. With Christopher, he wanted to lie on top, belly to belly, and come with his cock between Christopher’s greased thighs. This wasn’t ideal for Christopher, but he enjoyed it because [the boy] excited him terrifically. He was, in Christopher’s eyes, a genuine teenage stud. (Looking back, I get the impression that [this boy] jumped from adolescence to middle age without ever pausing to be a young man.)

  Wrestling and other forms of erotic violence are a feature of what I call a Whitmanesque relationship (see here). But Caskey was most definitely not a Whitman character. The love duels of naked camerados had no place in his fantasies. When Christopher suggested wrestling, Caskey was amused, in a grown-up way; he referred to it as “prep school stuff” and Christopher was so embarrassed that he never mentioned it again—though he sometimes pretended to himself that Caskey and he were wrestling, in the middle of a sex act. (The violence between Christopher and Caskey (see here) was grown-up violence, full of love—hate—quite unlike affectionate immature Whitmanesque violence. It resembled the fighting of married heterosexual couples.)

  When Caskey and Christopher were getting along well—which was most of the time, during 1945–1946—their domestic life was placid and curiously polite. They entertained each other with stories and jokes.5 They were very much on their best behavior. They were considerate. They contrived to flatter each other subtly. (I’m trying to describe the impression they would have made on someone who watched them while they were alone together and sober.) Their relationship when sober seems to me now to have been a surface relationship; they make me think of children playing at being grown-ups.

  Down below this relationship, on the deeper level of drunkenness, two individuals confronted each other who were neither considerate nor polite. Neither trusted the other. Both were ruthlessly alert to find an opening, a letting down of the other’s guard. Nevertheless, this was intimacy of a sort. It wasn’t playacting. And I think that Caskey and Christopher felt that this confrontation was what really mattered to both of them; it was what held them together.

  Taking a relationship apart and finding out what made it work (or not work) is so exquisitely difficult that I shall only be able to do it by slow degrees and ultimately by lucky guesses—if at all. One more idea occurs to me at the moment—namely that the Caskey–Christopher involvement lacked an element which was present in all Christopher’s similar involvements; it lacked a myth.

  What do I mean by a myth? I mean an abstract, poetical concept of the person you are having a relationship with which makes you able to regard him in double focus, either as a private individual or as a mythical representative figure, whichever you like. For example, Christopher saw Vernon Old as Vernon Old but also as Whitman’s American Boy. The contrast between these two aspects was ridiculously great—the hardboiled twentieth-century city youth and the sweet innocent nineteenth-century prairie comrade. Yet it was this myth which made him able to feel romantic about Vernon Old as Vernon Old.6

  A myth relationship has to be reciprocal, obviously, if it is going to work for long.7 Did Vernon have a myth about Christopher? I believe he did, for a while—and one which wasn’t quite so farfetched. I believe he saw Christopher as a romantic literary world-wanderer. (R. L. Stevenson, sort of) And of course, Christopher’s glamor was enhanced by the fact that, when Vernon met him, he was just back from China and a war.

  Anyhow, Christopher didn’t have a myth about Caskey. I doubt if he ever realized this at the time. Or, if he did, he regarded the lack of one as an advantage. He used to think of the relationship between himself and Caskey as being more down to earth and therefore more mature than any other he had previously experienced. The nearest he got to a Caskey myth was in regarding him sometimes as a nanny figure. But a nanny isn’t romantic. . . . Enough about this for the present, however.

  I doubt if Caskey had any kind of myth about Christopher. But he did definitely have one about himself He was constantly aware of himself as a Gemini. Christopher once overheard him murmuring to himself, “You’re a Gemini!” as he gazed at his face in the bathroom mirror. By this, Caskey meant that he was double-natured and that he delighted in his doubleness; that he reserved the right to switch natures at any moment, without warning.

  Early in January 1946, Christopher’s penis trouble either got much worse or he got impatient with it—for he switched from Dr. Williams (see here) to a surgeon named A. D. Gorfain. (Dr. Gorfain isn’t mentioned in the 1945 day-to-day diary, so this must have been their first contact.)

  I remember Gorfain as being young and strikingly handsome, with a supermasculine manner. But Christopher evidently felt at ease in his presence—or was it merely defiant?—for he quite unnecessarily wrote “homosexual” when filling out a medical questionnaire at Gorfain’s office. Gorfain took this calmly enough. He merely asked, “A strict homosexual?”—which made Christopher smile. Gorfain then diagnosed Christopher’s trouble as a median bar at the top of the urethra, inside the bladder. He assured Christopher that this was nothing unusual and absolutely nonmalignant; it could be removed without difficulty. The date of the operation was set for January 12, at the Santa Monica Hospital.

  My memory is that Christopher received this news with relief and also with a certain satisfaction. The relief is easy to understand, for he must have been worried. The satisfaction had a much odder and deeper cause—unless I am inventing this, and I don’t think I am. Christopher was satisfied because he felt that he deserved some ritual penalty for his failure to remain a monk, and now the penalty had been imposed and it was such a comparatively light one. (How perfectly suitable, though—a penis operation for a breach of celibacy!) It wasn’t, I believe, that Christopher felt any actual repentance. No—it was more like one’s uneasiness over a traffic ticket which hasn’t yet been taken care of.

  At that period of his life, Christopher still had a tendency to turn his illnesses into social occasions. He “invited” Sudhira to come to the hospital durin
g the two or three days he would have to be there, and act as his private nurse. Sudhira, of course, was delighted to do this. She spent the nights at the Entrada Drive apartment. She and Caskey drank and were shamelessly Irish together. But Caskey strongly disapproved of the operation, of Christopher’s attitude toward it, and indeed of all illness. He was, as Christopher used to say, one of nature’s Christian Scientists. His influence on Christopher was excellent in this respect, throughout their relationship, and he did succeed in curbing Christopher’s besetting tendency to hypochondria.

  Christopher arrived at the Santa Monica Hospital on the 11th, and was given the usual tranquilizing drugs. He was already all doped up when Dr. Gorfain appeared, greeted him saying, “Hi, skipper!” and then asked him, “You aren’t planning on becoming a parent, are you?” The reason for this question was as follows—it was Gorfain’s practice to guard against infection during this operation by tying the patient’s sperm tubes, thus making him sterile. Gorfain was about to ask Christopher’s permission to do this. No doubt he explained the situation clearly enough, but Christopher was dopier than he realized. Christopher misunderstood Gorfain to say, “You aren’t planning on becoming a parrot, are you?” The question seemed to him, in his condition, to be funny but not at all strange. He replied, smiling, “Well, Doctor, whether I planned it or not, I couldn’t very well become one, could I?” Gorfain found Christopher’s answer perfectly sensible—psychology was not his department, so he probably took it for granted that “a strict homosexual” would be incapable of impregnating a woman, and that this was what Christopher meant by not being able to become a parent. Thus the misunderstanding was made mutual.

  In Christopher’s notebook, the approach to the operating room is described: “The bed floated down the corridor and up the elevator, like a boat in a water lock.” He had been given sodium pentothal as well as a local anesthetic, and when he became conscious again, back in the ward, he was not only ecstatic but actually hallucinating. He saw a parrot8 flying around the room. He could also see Sudhira and Caskey standing beside the bed. It was clear to him that they were real and that the parrot wasn’t—indeed he could control its movements by his will. He demonstrated this to himself, with roars of laughter, making it perch on different objects.

  In a day or two, he left the hospital, drove back to the apartment, put on his trunks and went swimming. There was no relapse. Two or three times, he got a scare, because he passed blood when he tried to pee; but Dr. Gorfain told him not to worry about it. There was an unpleasant series of visits to Gorfain during which the urethra was probed and disinfected, and that was all. The wound ached now and then, in the course of the next four or five years, and when it did Christopher would feel mildly nauseated. Dr. Kolisch assured him later that the operation had been entirely unnecessary. Possibly this was true. But, as a ritual penalty, it had served its psychological purpose.

  Now that Christopher had been sterilized, he could no longer ejaculate sperm—at least, not until several years later, when a few drops would, very occasionally, work their way through the tied tubes as the result of an exceptionally violent orgasm. Otherwise, his sensations were the same as usual. And there was one notable advantage; if he was tired or not really interested, he could now fake an orgasm—since there was no ejaculation anyway, his sex partner could never be certain if he had come or not.

  Kolisch also told Christopher that sterilization would make him extra potent sexually for a while and then leave him completely impotent. The second part of this prediction didn’t turn out to be true. But Christopher was indeed very horny during the weeks following the operation, maybe because his urethra tickled as a result of the disinfection.

  Being horny, Christopher took to visiting what were known as The Pits, on State Beach. The Pits were hollows in some sand dunes which lay far back from the tide line, right below the wall which bounded the yard of the Marion Davies beach house. The shelter of the wall and of the pits, which had been deepened by their occupants, made a trap for any available sunshine on winter days; this was a perfect place for sunbathing. Since the beach was anyhow chiefly the domain of queers at that time of year, it was not surprising that the pits were used by them exclusively. Everybody was stark naked and many had erections. At your approach, heads emerged. You took your pants or trunks off in full view of the audience. There wasn’t much privacy even in the bottom of a pit, for your neighbors were apt to peep over. If you weren’t a bit of an exhibitionist, this was the wrong spot for you.

  It was quite the right spot for Christopher. Indeed, he enjoyed the exhibitionism more than the sex he got there. Much of this was with middle-aged men whom he wouldn’t have even considered under any other circumstances. Only one memory remains of sex with an attractive young man; Christopher blew him, while several other people looked on.

  The pleasures of exhibitionism were mildly spiced with risk; The Pits weren’t as sheltered as they seemed. They could be overlooked from the top of the wall. The Marion Davies beach house was then unoccupied, but gardeners looked after the plants in its yard and kept its swimming pool clean. At least one of these gardeners was both inquisitive and prudish. He would appear without warning on the wall—which bordered the pool—and yell abusively at anyone he saw making sex or even merely lying naked below. It was said that he had once called the police; a futile gesture—for of course his intended victims had run away long before they arrived.

  Caskey had been told by Christopher of his visits to The Pits and made jokes about them with indulgent amusement. He would never have gone there himself—The Pits belonged in the category of Christopher’s immature sexual tastes. (Not that Caskey ever used the word “immature”; he probably didn’t even think it consciously. But he felt it, and his feeling was expressed by his behavior.) Christopher accepted Caskey’s attitude; I think he himself was embarrassed by his fondness for The Pits and covered this by talking of his visits to them as sexual slumming. Like Caskey, he called the pit occupants “Pit Queens,” without including himself He and Caskey made up scenes for an imaginary movie: Pit Queen for a Day.9

  Although there is no reference to Caskey’s photography in the 1945 day-to-day diary, it’s probable that he had started working at it before the year ended. Soon after he and Christopher had begun living together, Caskey decided to become a professional photographer; it was one of those “good resolutions” you make on entering upon a new relationship or a new year. So Caskey took a course in developing, printing, enlarging, etc., and bought the necessary equipment. I believe the course was at Santa Monica City College and that it lasted about two months.

  Christopher was surprised and delighted to discover that Caskey had a great deal of talent; everybody who saw his work—and that later included several famous photographers10—agreed that this was so. Soon he was taking portraits and doing all his own darkroom work, at home.

  Among the people who came to the Entrada Drive apartment during the spring of 1946 were:

  George Platt Lynes. He took photographs of Caskey and Christopher in the apartment and also amongst the big wooden piles on the beach near the Lighthouse Café.

  Bob Stagg, a friend of Caskey’s from the pre-navy New York days. Bob was still in the navy and he was badly worried because he thought he might be sent out to the Marshall Islands for the A-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll which were to take place later that year. In those days nearly everybody except (?) the scientists believed that the results of an atomic explosion were quite unpredictable—maybe all the onlookers would be destroyed, maybe the Hawaiian Islands were in danger, maybe a tidal wave would travel clear across the Pacific and swamp Santa Monica. But Bob wasn’t sent to the tests after all. He soon returned to civilian life, working as an architect in New York. He was a good-looking lazy friendly young man who drank a great deal.

  Carlos McClendon and Dick Keate. They were the season’s most attractive pair of lovers; both sweetly pretty boys. Carlos, though a blond, was partly Mexican and had a lot of Latin charm
. Dick had been a major (I think)[11] in the air force and had flown many missions over Germany. (Christopher used to call him “The Angel of Death.”) There was a story about his demobilization: Dick, while still in uniform, used to frequent the bar of the Biltmore Hotel, downtown,[12] and was accustomed to be treated by the bartenders with the respect due to his rank and his combat ribbons. A short while after leaving the service, Dick returned to that same bar, wearing the [. . .] clothes which expressed his fun-loving peacetime personality. One of the bartenders, not recognizing him, exclaimed, “Get that [kid] out of here!” and Dick was refused a drink. . . . Carlos and Dick were then very much in love—Carlos perhaps even more so than Dick—and they simply couldn’t keep their hands off each other for long. At a party, they [were inseparable].

  (The word “party” reminds me of the songs people played on the record players of those days. There have been only two periods in Christopher’s life in which he was acutely song conscious, though for different reasons: his life with Caskey in 1945–1946, and his early life in Berlin. Christopher was aware of the Berlin songs of the thirties because they were in German, which he was eager to learn, and because they expressed for him the glamor of this city he had fallen in love with. He felt the glamor of the American songs also, but the effect they had on him was far more painful than pleasant. “It wouldn’t be make-believe / If you believed in me . . .” “My sweet embraceable you . . .” “Ev’ry time we say goodbye, / I die a little . . .”13 Sinatra creating his tremendous pauses: “Why does its flight make us stop——in the night, and wish——as we all do?” Even today, I can recapture something of Christopher’s sensations as he heard them, a sweet but sickening sense of being bewitched, entrapped, unable to escape. He wanted to escape from this party, these people, this life he was leading—the kind of life which these songs seemed to describe. Did he really want to? Yes, but not enough. For the songs were the incantation of a spell which made him helpless. He hated them for that. And he copied into his commonplace book a passage from Proust which might have been written expressly to relieve his own resentment: