afternoon, after lunching with a young man named Neville King-Page. I think Neville must have been a friend of John Lehmann and that Christopher met him at John’s party on the 15th. Neville must have let Christopher know through John that he was anxious to go to bed with him. Christopher seldom turned down offers from
strangers and anyhow Neville was quite sexy, though probably a bit crazy. (He later committed suicide.) But this was Christopher’s last day in London and he had already arranged to take Bob and May Buckingham and their son Robin to supper at The White Tower.
So he couldn’t meet Neville again until late that evening. Neville had recently moved into other rooms and didn’t feel he could trust his new landlady to be understanding. Christopher went up to ask John if he could spend the night with Neville there. Neville waited out on the street. To Christopher’s surprise and disgust, John refused to agree to this, saying that Alexis wouldn’t like it. I’m nearly sure John was lying and that he was merely afraid Neville would make noisy sex with Christopher and keep John himself awake, and then gobble up a huge breakfast. Christopher had to go out and send Neville away. They never saw each other again.
counterdemonstration against Stephen’s marriage. What is much odder is that this pair of old friends were then to discover that they were marvellously compatible sex partners.
In the Portugal days, after some quarrel with Tony, Christopher had written spitefully about Tony’s “primly composed rabbit mouth.” And once he had said to him sarcastically, “If you were my little boy––” to which Tony had answered, “Thank God I’m not!” But now Christopher began to find Tony’s face charming and to be hotly excited by Tony’s strong coarse-skinned white body and thick curly reddish brown hair. And Tony told Christopher that he was a much better sex mate than Stephen had been, because he knew how to lead down from an orgasm as well as up to it.
During the rest of 1937 and the second half of 1938 (after Christopher got back from China) Tony and Christopher went to bed together whenever an opportunity offered itself––either at Pembroke Gardens or on visits to Cuthbert Worsley and Tony Bower, who were then having a big affair. In August 1938 they stayed for a while at Dover and then went over to Ostende where they saw Gerald Hamilton. They always had a lot to talk and laugh about and became very fond of each other and grateful for so much mutually satisfied lust. But their relationship was absolutely without romance––which only meant that Christopher could spend nights with Tony even when he was in love with somebody else. He always fucked Tony; that was what they both enjoyed most. The first time Christopher did it, he found the act so delicious that he was unwilling to wash Tony’s shit off his cock, so he let it stay there till next morning. I think this was the one occasion when Christopher reacted to Tony in a way which could be called sentimental.
116
Lost Years
Before leaving London next day, Christopher saw Robert
Medley and Rupert Doone. The day-to-day diary doesn’t say where he saw them or if they had a meal together, nor does it say if Francis Bacon was with them. (Bacon isn’t mentioned in the
day-to-day diary until 1952, and yet I have a strong impression that Christopher had met him before that.) In the afternoon,
Christopher took the boat train to Southampton and went on board the Queen Elizabeth.
The Queen Elizabeth was much in the news, for she had run
aground on a shifting sandbank called the Brambles, as she entered Southampton Water on her previous inbound voyage. Her
passengers had been disembarked in launches and she had been
towed off, which had delayed this sailing for several days. John Lehmann had jokingly said that this was yet another symptom of the collapse of the British Empire. When she sailed next morning (April 19) everybody was on deck to watch her crawling progress through the danger area. As she grazed the sandbank, the water turned brown; but she didn’t stick.
When the seating lists were being made up for tables in the dining room Christopher had hastily cruised around for a tolerable table mate. The young man he picked on proved to be a lucky guess, and every bit as glad to be found by Christopher as Christopher was to find him. His name was John Holmes. During the war he had had an important government job in Canada; I think he had been an aide to the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King.
Every night after supper, John and Christopher would go up onto the boat deck, where it was cold and windy and pitch dark and deserted. If you leaned against the funnel you were sheltered from the wind, and the funnel itself was pleasantly warm. Here they kissed and groped each other and sucked cock and had orgasms, without even taking off their topcoats. It was fun but frustrating because it made them eager to go to bed together, which was nearly impossible; each was sharing his cabin with somebody else. Their only opportunity was during the first serving of dinner in the dining room, for John’s cabin sharer had chosen this, while John and Christopher had chosen the second. One evening, John and Christopher decided to take the risk. They darted into the cabin, tore off their clothes and got in three or four minutes of sex which were wildly exciting because of the haste and danger; then they were interrupted by someone pounding on the door. Christopher grabbed his clothes and jumped naked into the bathroom to dress. It was only the steward, wanting to tidy the beds, but Christopher and John were too badly startled to care to continue.
¾ 1947 ¾
117
When they parted in New York,1 John told Christopher that he was “a very wholesome person.” I think John was inclined to be something of a closet queen. When he called Christopher “wholesome” he was envying Christopher’s relative freedom from sexual inhibitions.
Caskey was waiting for Christopher on the dock with their car (he had driven it from California to New York). Christopher was delighted to discover how attractive Caskey was to him, after their three months’ separation. He felt himself falling in love, all over again. As for Caskey, he appeared to be equally delighted, though in his own very different style. He was at his most sophisticated––urban, well dressed, well groomed, demure, sparkling, flippantly sentimental. His eyes were bright with flattering Irish glances; but the only compliment he paid Christopher was half in joke––he said that Christopher’s hair “looked quite glamorous.” Then he went on to speak of the charming sailor he had spent the previous night with.
Christopher promptly began to brag about the sexiness of John Holmes. Caskey smiled and seemed subtly amused. As they drove off the dock, he pulled the car into a sheltered parking place, threw his arms around Christopher and kissed him.
Caskey had been staying at the Park Central Hotel and had moved from a single to a double room so that Christopher could spend the night there. (Caskey had already had a run-in with the house
detective because of the late-remaining guests he had entertained in his single.)
That evening, Caskey and Christopher went to see Ingrid
Bergman in Joan of Lorraine, which must have been a ghastly play, though I think they were both dazzled into grudging acceptance of it by Bergman’s beauty and stage presence. They also had a meeting with James and Tania Stern. The Sterns were leaving for Europe the next day and Caskey and Christopher were taking over their
apartment for the summer. (Christopher later discovered that Auden was shocked because the Sterns were charging Christopher a rent far in excess of what they themselves were paying for it––I have forgotten how much this actually was. Jimmy Stern was just being Jewish, of course, but Christopher couldn’t say this to Auden in front of Chester Kallman.)
On April 26, Caskey and Christopher spent their first night in the apartment, at 207 East 52nd Street. I don’t think they went to bed until after dawn; it was a long sexless night of drinking and dialogue 1 They landed at about 9:00 a.m. on April 25.