Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  I suppose that Christopher must have discovered, on the day of their meeting, the following basic facts about Jim—that he was an architect23 and at present employed on a fairly large job, the building of about a dozen houses in the Brentwood area; that he had been trained as an architect at Frank Lloyd Wright’s two centers, Taliesin North in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona; that he had joined the air force during the war and had been sent to England but not until the fighting was nearly over; that he was the only child of a widow and was unmarried and homosexual.

  Jim knew about Christopher’s writing and had read some of it, I think; I forget which book or books. He wasn’t an ardent Isherwood fan, however, and Christopher had the impression (later confirmed) that their immediate rapport was a here-and-now affair; it had nothing to do with previous literary admiration, as far as Jim was concerned. This pleased Christopher, of course. And, as that evening progressed with the discovery of more and more topics and tastes in common, Christopher was finally moved to a drunkenly frank statement, “You know, I really like you!” Jim grinned and gave Christopher a mistrustful but pleased look, then turning his head aside, he growled, “You’ll find I’m a lousy lay.” Christopher was amused but taken aback. He hadn’t meant this as a pass. (If he had wanted to get Jim in the hay, he would have led up to it much more gradually; indeed he almost never made a direct pass until he was certain of success, because it embarrassed him to be turned down.) He had had no reason to think that Jim would agree to go to bed with him—Jim had been talking romantically about a long-ago love for a teenage boy—and Christopher had felt no particular desire to go to bed with Jim. However, now that the whole situation had changed within a couple of seconds, Christopher found himself intrigued, curious and quite prepared to follow through. For some reason, Jim couldn’t come back with Christopher to the El Kanan then and there; they agreed to meet again the next night.

  Jim’s statement that he was “a lousy lay” may have been meant as a flirty come-on; however, Christopher found that he had had surprisingly little sex experience for his age. He had had almost no serious involvements, either with men or women. Since moving to California, his only contacts had been while cruising the coast highway in his car; he picked up hitchhiking servicemen and bought them drinks, after which they sometimes let him blow them. Jim was extraordinarily persistent in his cruising—if necessary, he would pick up half a dozen prospects in the course of one night—but he was also strangely shy when he had to make the pass, so every score cost him a maximum effort.

  While staying in Arizona, Jim had met Max Ernst the artist. Ernst had told him that he was the kind of boy who ought to be fucked every day. I don’t know if Ernst had meant literally fucked by another man or merely that Jim should get himself laid by a person of no matter which sex. Anyhow, Christopher did literally fuck Jim, for the first time in Jim’s life. (“You took my cherry,” Jim later growled.)

  I have only one clear memory of Christopher’s first sex encounter with Jim—the uncoy, entirely matter-of-fact way Jim took off his clothes, almost before Christopher had had time to close the door of his room at the El Kanan. He was like an athlete eager to start playing a game. Having undressed, he threw himself naked into bed, as if plunging into a swimming pool. Nakedness made him seem very young, almost babyish; a baby who was also a puppy.24 He giggled, bit, kissed, licked, sucked and bounced up and down on the mattress. He wouldn’t even pretend to be serious. While Christopher was inclined to verbalize the situation, paying his partner compliments, uttering erotic words and generally talking up the orgasm, Jim said nothing. He came easily, without fuss—after which he would usually make some nearly inaudible wisecrack.

  Jim was highly potent. He could have two or more orgasms (as he later demonstrated) with anybody who wasn’t altogether repulsive. Many of his subsequent sex mates told him that he was “insatiable.” But Christopher nevertheless got the impression that his behavior in bed was affectionate rather than lustful. He loved kissing. He would kiss and hug you almost indefinitely, if you didn’t insist on going further. He was never in a hurry. Jim’s childlike affectionate playfulness was touching and curiously innocent—it made him delightful to go to bed with. But Christopher had to admit to himself that, as far as he was concerned, Jim lacked one important sexual virtue; he was too wholesome to be really exciting, his sex making was vigorous but bland. (Here, I am trying hard to be objective—which Christopher ceased to be, after the first time they had sex together. Thenceforward, Christopher’s reason for wanting to continue going to bed with Jim was simply that Christopher had fallen violently in love with him.)

  What had made Christopher fall in love with Jim? The most comprehensive answer I can think of is that Jim appealed to him as The American Boy, a boy out of Whitman’s poems. Jim was in many ways a much better specimen of a Whitman American than Vernon Old. Jim, like Vernon, was a twentieth-century town dweller, but it was easier to imagine Jim living in the country and the nineteenth century. Jim had a much more poetical feeling for landscape than Vernon had—though Vernon cared more for animals. Jim’s descriptions of western canyons and deserts and forests were graphic and full of poetry for Christopher. And Jim, despite all his hang-ups, seemed more spontaneous and therefore more like a Whitman boy than Vernon—at any rate in bed, which was where it counted most. You could imagine Jim as a “Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy” lying all night out of doors kissing Whitman under a blanket. Whereas Vernon would have soon started to complain that he was getting sleepy and that Whitman’s beard tickled.

  Self-reliant solitude is one of the chief characteristics of Whitman’s wandering American Boy. Christopher saw this characteristic in Jim and it moved him deeply. Later, he tried to describe it when writing about the character he called Bob Wood25 in The World in the Evening:

  What struck me chiefly about him, always, was his quality of loneliness; and this was even more apparent when he and Charles came to visit me together. When, for example, Bob was fixing our cocktails, his slim figure with its big shoulders bending over the bottles would look strangely weary and solitary, and he seemed suddenly miles away from either of us. He was like a prospector preparing a meal in the midst of the wilderness.[26]

  For Christopher, born on an intimate little island, The American Boy embodied his country’s fascinating and challenging aloofness. Christopher felt challenged to break through this aloofness and make a closer contact with Jim—and yet he didn’t really want to, for that would have destroyed much of Jim’s romantic appeal.

  Even after Christopher had known Jim for years, he remained deeply impressed by Jim’s self-reliance. He was always able to look out for himself and keep himself occupied—he was never at a loose end. When Christopher came to visit, he would find Jim drafting plans for a house, or making a model of a plane, or drawing nude teenage boys, slim, crop-headed and snub-nosed, who grinned as they played with each other’s cocks. (Christopher called them Charlton Boys; they all looked a bit like Jim.) Jim was also an efficient cook and a neat housekeeper. Whenever he moved into a new apartment, no matter how shabby and temporary, he would make it recognizably personal—painting it in amusing colors, fixing up odd lamps and covering the walls with striking pictures and clippings from magazines. If Jim felt restless, he would take off in his car and explore some remote stretch of country, all on his own. Once, when he had gone swimming in an irrigation ditch in the desert, miles from anywhere, he had discovered that he couldn’t climb back up its concrete walls and had been trapped there for hours until someone happened to come by. On another occasion, he had been climbing a cliff by the seashore and had fallen. He had had to drive himself home with his leg broken.

  Jim had been born in Reading, Pennsylvania. But he preferred to recall the fact that he had been conceived at Love Field in Dallas, Texas—since both the name and the state sound more romantic. Jim’s parents had been living near Love Field at that time because his father was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. When air postal service began, he flew
mail. He was killed in a crash while Jim was still very young.27 The example of Jim’s father may possibly have predisposed Jim to join the air force, but that wasn’t the way Jim told it. He described how he had seen two planes appear suddenly out of a canyon, in Arizona, and soar up into the sky doing aerobatics, and how he had decided, then and there, that he must fly too. In other words, Jim’s enlistment had been for aesthetic reasons—it had nothing directly to do with admiration for his father, and nothing whatever with patriotism.

  In his flying stories, Jim always made fun of himself. He told how, soon after he had started to solo, he had decided that it would be beautiful to fly over a neighboring lake and dip first one wing tip and then the other in the water, so as to leave ripple-rings right across its surface. He hadn’t managed to do this, however, and had come to his instructor for advice. The instructor had told him he was an idiot and very lucky—if he had succeeded in touching the water with his wing tip he would have wrecked his plane.

  When Jim was finally sent to England, he flew several times over Germany, but the Luftwaffe was by then practically nonexistent and he was never in combat.[28] Once, however, while he was over Berlin—he found he wanted to pee. You had to do this into a special container and it was awkward because of the lack of space. Jim somehow got himself entangled in his machine guns and unintentionally fired them—which brought several of his fellow pilots whizzing down out of the clouds, thinking he was being attacked.

  If Jim had been just another good candidate for the role of Whitman American Boy, Christopher would have fallen for him anyway; but what made Christopher really love Jim, and go on doing so long after his feelings had ceased to be romantic, was his view of Jim as an essentially ridiculous character, even a bit of a fake.

  For one thing, Jim was apt to talk like a male impersonator, in a voice which was too deep for his physique and too butch for his I.Q. He must have worked on this voice a lot when he was younger and eager to adjust to the air force. Also he had a pseudomasculine mannerism which he often affected while telephoning; he would ring your number, say hello so that you knew who was calling and then remain silent until you said something in reply. Christopher (and many others) had the impression that this was a game; Jim’s silence was a challenge. When two tough guys confront each other, it is traditionally the weaker who starts talking first. Jim was playing the hero in a western movie.

  Although Christopher made affectionate fun of Jim’s male impersonations, he privately found them sexually attractive. But he couldn’t admit this even to Jim. He would have liked Jim to play the stud in bed, but Jim never playacted there; he dropped his affectations with his clothes. He would fuck Christopher as readily as he would let himself be fucked, but neither of the two positions was symbolic, as far as Jim was concerned—this was simply a matter of give and take. So Christopher was reduced to indulging his fantasy in secret, during the act. With Jim’s cock inside him, he told himself: “The big fighter pilot was naked on top of him, raping him, fucking the shit out of him . . .” etc. etc.

  When Christopher met Jim, Jim had already been worried for a long time by the shape of the tip of his nose. He had wanted to have it altered, but the plastic surgeon whom he had consulted had pooh-poohed the idea, telling him that he would do better to go to an analyst and find out why he disliked his nose. Jim had followed the surgeon’s advice and consulted a number of analysts, without getting any definite answers.

  Jim’s current analyst—a Jewish family-father—kept urging him to take up family life, with all its responsibilities and joys. He represented homosexual life as being irresponsible, immature and wretched, by contrast. He drooled over the satisfaction he got from washing his baby’s diapers. Jim related this to Christopher, obviously wanting him to speak up for the opposition. Christopher did so, with enthusiasm. He poured scorn on the analyst and refuted his statements, and Jim was delighted. What Christopher didn’t realize until much later was that Jim was far more disturbed by the analyst’s propaganda than he would admit. Jim secretly felt that he ought to get married and support a family. And he certainly wanted to have a son—who would grow up to become a Charlton Boy. Maybe Jim had fantasies of going to bed with him. (A few years after this, Jim begot a male baby and married its mother, thereby [also] acquiring stepsons. [. . .])

  But, for the time being, Jim accepted Christopher as his mentor. He was much impressed by the number of people Christopher had been to bed with—Christopher could no longer state an exact figure but he guessed at one, I think it was somewhere in the four hundreds. Jim immediately vowed to beat this, and, within two or three years, he reported that he had done so.

  Throughout the rest of August, Christopher and Jim met whenever they could. Sometimes, Jim stayed the night at the El Kanan. Christopher introduced him to Hayden and Rod, who were flatteringly envious. Hayden said, “Where on earth did you find him?” Rod made a pass at Jim in the men’s room of the restaurant where they were celebrating Christopher’s birthday.

  On the first weekend of that September, the 4th and 5th, Jim and Christopher went on a trip. They drove down to Laguna Beach, where Christopher had reserved a room at a motel. The room had a double bed in it. “I’d thought it was to be for a man and wife,” the motel manager said, eyeing them suspiciously. They assured him it didn’t matter, and started undressing as soon as he had left. “Let’s go to Laguna and fuck,” Christopher had said, and fuck they did for the rest of the afternoon, until it was time to have supper with Chris Wood.

  Next day, Sunday the 5th, they drove all day, visiting the Capistrano Mission, Lake Elsinore, the Observatory on Mount Palomar and Warner Hot Springs before returning to Laguna Beach. In a note in the journal, when he is restarting it on November 6, 1948, Christopher describes September 5 as having been “one of the happiest days of my life.” Why?

  Christopher used to be fond of saying, at that time, that happiness is simply the breaking of contact with pain, since it is in our nature to be happy whenever the reasons for being unhappy cease to exist. A highly subjective statement which smells of Disneyism, it is perhaps true in this particular instance. If Christopher was especially happy that day, it was basically because he had no immediate woes or worries. He was in perfect health. He was earning plenty of money at the studio. He had the clear conscience of a wage earner on holiday who knows that his work is up to schedule and is giving satisfaction to his employers. He was released from all the anxieties which arose whenever he was with Caskey. At the same time, he had no reason to be anxious about Caskey in his absence, for Caskey wrote regularly and would soon be returning to California.

  But all this was on the negative side merely; the negating of causes for unhappiness. On the positive side was Jim himself On this day and for this kind of outing, he must have seemed to Christopher to be the absolutely ideal companion. Christopher was fascinated by Jim’s conversation and by his stories about his life. He found Jim romantic, ridiculous and delightful. He was hot for Jim and knew that Jim would have sex whenever he wanted it. Above all, he realized instinctively, even then, that Jim wouldn’t present any problem in his relations with Caskey. Christopher felt he could let himself go and indulge his crush on Jim to the utmost, because there were no strings attached to him.

  Jim probably felt very much the same way about Christopher.29 While they were together at Lake Elsinore that day, Jim muttered, “No wonder people fall in love with you!” The way he said this made it sound like an accusation—but that was as near as Jim could get to sentiment. He certainly found Christopher exciting to be with. And he enjoyed going to bed with him. As for the existence of Caskey, I’m sure that didn’t worry Jim. Being a Dog Person, he could attach himself to a couple just as readily as to an individual. Which is what he later did.

  The next weekend, Christopher got three whole days off from the studio, September 11–13. On the 11th, Jim and Christopher drove to Laguna Beach again; this time, they stayed with Chris Wood. On the 12th, they drove down to Mexico and stayed a
t the huge old Hotel Pacifico in Ensenada. They had some drinks and then decided to take a shower before supper. Under the shower, Jim grabbed Christopher and began kissing him. They must have kissed for at least half an hour without stopping. Then they dried themselves, fucked and fell asleep. Several hours later, Christopher awoke and, as he did so, had a minor psychic experience. It is described in The World in the Evening (part two, chapter three):

  There was a night . . . when I’d woken from heavy dreamless sleep after making love with Jane, and hadn’t known who or where I was. I’d seemed to be looking down, from some impersonal no-place, at our two bodies lying in each other’s arms on the bed. I could swear that I’d actually hesitated, then, like a guest at the end of a party who looks at two overcoats, not sure for a moment which is which, before I’d decided, “That one’s mine.”

  (There is, of course, one falsification here. Stephen, in the novel, is said to be looking down on a male and a female body—not on two male bodies, as Christopher was. Could one actually be in doubt as to one’s sex? I suppose it’s possible. But that wasn’t Christopher’s experience.)

  Next morning, they went on the beach—huge and (in those days) deserted. Christopher admired Jim’s powerful swimming. (He was also a daring surfer.) As they drove back toward the border, Jim suggested stopping near the edge of a big cliff overlooking the sea. Jim had explored this cliff on a previous visit and said that its slope was full of small hollows where you could lie hidden and sunbathe—in other words, fuck. Christopher vetoed this idea—I forget why, but I am sorry he did, because this would have added another happy memory to his memories of their trip. Making love with Jim in the open air always seemed particularly suitable; he was not only a Whitman Nature Boy but also a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, who opened his houses—including their bedrooms—to the outdoors.