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––slow drinking and even slower dialogue. It remains vaguely but powerfully in my mind as being a high point in their relationship.
The dialogue was about their feelings for each other; that much I’m sure of. But I can’t remember a single line of it. This was quite unlike their normal drunken confrontations (see pages 52 and 60). What made it memorable was that neither one of them was harboring a grudge against the other at that particular moment––for the obvious reason that they had been apart for so long. And, on the positive side, I think both of them were pleased and surprised and rather proud that their relationship remained as good as new. Caskey was at heart a pessimist, with a low opinion of himself––I realize that nowadays much more clearly than Christopher did at the time. Therefore Caskey had probably been expecting that Christopher would return from England feeling bored with him and ready to call the whole thing off. . . . One thing I do remember: this night of drinking didn’t result in either Caskey or Christopher becoming really drunk or getting a hangover. Which in itself seems to prove that its psychological climate was more bracing than usual.
The Sterns’ apartment was just around the corner from Third
Avenue, along which the El[*] still ran, in those days. If the noise of the trains could be heard from the apartment, I don’t remember it as loud enough to be disturbing. The traffic along East 52nd Street can’t have been very heavy, for Caskey was nearly always able to find a parking place for their car, not too far from 207. As long as they were in New York, Caskey did all the driving because Christopher could never grasp the one-way street system––that is to say, he had decided not to grasp it.
It was during their stay in New York that the “nanny” aspect of their relationship (see page 61) began to emerge. Christopher’s excuse for letting Caskey drive was that New York City was
Caskey’s town, not his––for it had been the scene of Caskey’s life before he went into the navy. But, in fact, Christopher wanted to relax and surrender his will (in all matters that weren’t important to him) to a nanny figure who would wait on him and relieve him from the tension of making decisions. (He reserved the right to sulk and passively resist, just as a child does, when Nanny’s decisions didn’t suit him.)
The apartment itself was snug and well furnished; it seemed much more of a home for them than their two earlier habitations. And Caskey, as before, was prepared to make it as comfortable as possible, and to cook for and entertain their friends. Caskey had a great many
[* Elevated train.]
¾ 1947 ¾
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friends in New York and Christopher had Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, Auden, Berthold Viertel, Tony Bower and others. Nearly all their evenings were social.
On May 1, Christopher had lunch with Bennett Cerf. This must
have been to discuss Christopher’s plan to go to South America with Caskey and write a travel book about their journey, illustrated by Caskey’s photographs. (Promoting Caskey’s career as a photographer was Christopher’s chief reason1 for wanting to make the trip; he always dreaded embarking on any travel and only really enjoyed it in retrospect.) Since they now had the money from Judgement Day in Pittsburgh, they could easily afford the travelling expenses, even without the advances on royalties they would get from Random
House and from Methuen.
The lunch with Cerf must have included a visit to the Random
House offices, because I have two vivid memories of that meeting which don’t fit into a restaurant. One is of Cerf seated complacently behind his desk, with his yessing assistants around him. They are discussing a possible title for the book. Suddenly Cerf––that incomparable ass––gets an inspiration; he becomes a Jewish prophet passing the word down from God: “The High Andes! That’s what we’ll call it––“The High” (a slight but deeply reverent pause)
“Andes!!” (Christopher never for one instant considered using this, of course.)
The other memory is of being introduced to Truman Capote.
(Even at this prepublication stage of Truman’s career, it had to be that way around; one couldn’t imagine Truman being introduced to oneself.) Christopher was prepared for the honor by one of the Random House partners, who assured him that this young man,
whose first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was soon to appear, could only be compared to Proust. And then the marvellously
gracious little baby personage itself appeared; Truman sailed into the room with his right hand extended, palm downward, as if he
expected Christopher to kiss it. Christopher didn’t, but, within a few moments, he was quite ready to––having been almost instantane-ously conquered by the campy Capote charm. To hell with Proust; here was something infinitely rarer and more amusing, a live Ronald Firbank character! Christopher came home and raved about him to 1 I now realize that another, surprisingly important reason was Christopher’s desire to impress Hayden Lewis––that smiling sneering spectator and critic of the drama of his affair with Caskey. Christopher was determined that Hayden should have to admit that Caskey’s life was more exciting, more interesting, more glamorous, more fun than it had ever been before he met Christopher.
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Caskey. And when Caskey himself met Truman (on May 21) he
wasn’t at all disappointed. There and then, they accepted Truman’s invitation to come and stay with him and his friend, Newton Arvin, on Nantucket in July.
On May 5, Christopher joined a gymnasium which was run by an
old German named Pilates. It was somewhere over on the West Side, maybe Seventh Avenue.[*] I think that Caskey had recommended it and that Caskey himself had gone to it at one time, but he didn’t rejoin with Christopher. Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. “Look at him!” Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, “That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he’s done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!”
Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. “That’s not fat,”
he declared, punching himself in the stomach, “that’s good healthy meat!” He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks.1
Pilates was an excellent teacher, however, and Christopher learnt a lot from him, even though Christopher gave up going to the gym early in July.2 I remember only two small pearls of his wisdom. Once, a party of workmen were handling heavy metal objects on the roof of the building opposite. Pilates watched them and commented
disgustedly that their posture and movements were all wrong––if only these men knew how, they could transform their boring work into a scientific workout and build themselves marvellous physiques.
And once he told Christopher, “If you’ll just touch your toes one single time, every day of your life, you’ll be all right”––which made Christopher think of a saint begging some hopelessly worldly
1 Such behavior sounds scarcely credible, but I’m sure memory isn’t at fault here. Pilates was the sort of eccentric character who can get away with murder.
I dare say the girls he did this to were lovers or old friends, who were either excited or amused by him. The gym was often almost empty when Christopher was there, and perhaps Pilates knew instinctively that Christopher would be a suitable audience for his exhibitionism.