Waldeck remain in my mind as two people I wish Christopher had gotten to know better.
[* Athene Palace Bucharest: Hitler’s “New Order” Comes to Rumania (1943); Waldeck was a Rumanian journalist settled in the USA from the end of the 1920s. Returning to Europe in wartime, she found that in Bucharest she could intimately observe the Nazi style of establishing power. As she writes in Athene Palace, “she had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the victory of an order of which anti-semitism was an integral part” (p. 6). She felt semi-protected by her status as a U.S. citizen, and reveals that she was sometimes duplicitous in order to achieve friendships useful to her journalism. She gave her book an epigraph from Stendhal to protest her underlying integrity: “Shall I be accused of approving these things because I describe them?”]
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Caskey and Christopher went out to the beach fairly often, during this period. There was Long Beach,[*] where they met up with Ollie Jennings and Ben and Emilio Baz. There was a beach I don’t
remember the name of, where people fucked quite openly in the dunes––Christopher once had to step over a couple who were doing it right across the footpath. (You could go to this beach by bus; the driver, when he stopped at the entrance to it, would shout: “All out for Fairyland!”) And there was Fire Island––a long drive plus a ferry crossing but you could do the round-trip in one day.
One of their visits to Fire Island was on Christopher’s birthday.
Christopher had got drunk the night before and passed out. He woke to find himself in the car, with Caskey driving. They were already a good distance out of New York. “The last thing you said last night was, ‘Take me to Wystan,’ ” Caskey told him. “So I’m taking you.”
Christopher was delighted. This was Caskey in his aspect as the perfect nanny.
There is an unusually vivid memory attached to one of the Fire Island visits, probably this one. In the late afternoon, as the time approached for them to leave, a storm was building up. After a heavy stillness, the first gusts of wind began whipping the dry grass of the dunes. These gusts were uncannily strong, they made the grass hiss with a sound exactly like drops of water falling on a very hot skillet.
Christopher remembered the stories he had heard about the
hurricane and was apprehensive. Auden, calm as usual in this sort of situation, insisted on playing a literary guessing game; one of them had to quote a line of verse or prose and the other had to identify its author. I remember that Christopher surprised himself by doing well at this, although his attention was elsewhere. I don’t think there was a storm after all, certainly not a big one.
Their final visit to Fire Island was on September 13. They went down there for one day only, with Lincoln Kirstein, Stephen
Spender, Chris Wood and Berthold Szczesny. Caskey took a lot of pictures of this historic occasion, including a trio of Wystan, Stephen and Christopher posed just as they had posed for Stephen’s brother Humphrey on Rügen Island, fifteen or sixteen years earlier.[†] This was probably the first time that Wystan had seen Berthold since the Berlin days. It was certainly the first time that Wystan, Stephen and Christopher had all been together since 1939. I remember that Chester took a great fancy to Berthold. They were able to communicate fairly well, because Chester could speak Yiddish.
[* On Long Island.]
[† In the Baltic Sea, during the first two weeks of July 1931.]
¾ 1947 ¾
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At least two of the group photographs shot that day cannot be Caskey’s, since he is in them; they may have been taken by Stephen, since he isn’t. This would explain the ridiculous and yet (I am sure) characteristic pose in which the photographer has caught Christopher; Stephen’s malicious eye would have been quick to notice and take advantage of it. Eight of the eleven people in the picture are lying on the sand, all fairly relaxed. Caskey stands behind them, smiling and striking a campy attitude. Next to him stands Chris Wood, looking down, lost in his own thoughts. Next to Chris stands Christopher. His legs are apart, his fists are clenched, his plump little figure is rigid with self-assertion. He looks at the others as if he were demanding their submission to his will, but in fact no one is paying him the smallest attention.
When one glimpses Christopher off guard like this, it seems
astonishing that more people didn’t find him totally absurd. I do remember that there was a boy––a friend of Ed Tauch’s––who burst out laughing at Christopher when they were on the beach together.
Christopher asked him what he was laughing about and he answered,
“It’s the way you keep strutting!”
On September 16, Caskey’s mother had supper with Caskey and
Christopher. (I’m not sure if this was their first meeting; it’s possible that Mrs. Caskey had been out to California to visit them in 1946, but I don’t think so.) Catherine Caskey was very like her son Bill in certain ways; she was pretty, flirtatious, campy and quite unshock-able, and she had the South in her mouth. She was also a nonstop, indiscreet irrelevant talker, and this embarrassed Bill and drove him into rages. Catherine never thought about what she was saying and she would often repeat reactionary ideas she had picked up in Kentucky and didn’t even believe in. For example, she once told Bill that one of his sisters was refusing to have sex with her husband because she didn’t want any more children and wouldn’t use contra-ceptives. “Poor little Catholic wife!” Catherine kept repeating fatuously, until Bill hit the ceiling. That Catherine was an utter hypocrite as far as Catholic morality was concerned was proved by her acceptance of Bill’s relationship with Christopher. She and Christopher got along together splendidly.
On September 19, Christopher and Caskey sailed for South
America on the Santa Paula, of the Grace Line. Mrs. Caskey,
Matthew Huxley, Chris Wood, Tony Bower, Berthold Szczesny and Paul Cadmus came to see them off. I believe it was Tony Bower who brought them a big bottle of champagne. For some reason, they didn’t get around to drinking it, and, after a couple of days, when the 140
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ship was rolling, the bottle exploded like a bomb. Christopher narrowly escaped getting his face cut.
Caskey and Christopher had had a heavy night of drinking before they embarked, and had left the apartment looking as if it had been searched by the police. Mrs. Caskey spent a couple of days tidying up after them and packing up the things they hadn’t wanted to take with them on their journey.1
■
1 The day-to-day diary’s list of books read in 1947 includes: Back, Henry Green. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford. The Shadow Line, Joseph Conrad.
Knock on Any Door, Willard Motley. The Gallery, John Horne Burns. Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte. Le Livre blanc, Cocteau. [Attributed to Cocteau who did the preface and illustrations for this anonymous book.] Williwaw and The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal. The Member of the Wedding and Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers. The Rock Pool, Cyril Connolly. The Stranger, Albert Camus.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote. Manservant and Maidservant, Ivy Compton-Burnett. (There are a number of others––including some quite distinguished works: On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Juenger, Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans, Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare, The Moonlight by Joyce Cary, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen and The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West––about which I can remember absolutely nothing.) I remembered nothing about Back when I opened it just now (December 6, 1972), and yet I find that it has an ending in Henry’s best and most characteristic manner; no one else could have written it. The Good Soldier (since reread) has left nothing in my memory but its claim to be “the saddest story I ever heard”––which seems to me absurd and perhaps even deliberately campy; Ford’s disingenuousness is part of his charm. The Shadow Line is another unmemorable work by a beloved writer; Conrad combines startlingly realistic moments of physical experience (the tropical raindrop falling on his face in the midst of the spooky calm) with the artificiality of a cultured foreigner talking English at a literary tea. Christopher was much moved by Knock on Any Door when he read it; this was his idea of a sad story. He fell in love with the hero and wrote Willard Motley a fan letter. The Gallery has left me with a strong sense of the Italian wartime atmosphere, which is certainly something––but that trashy, traitorous liar Malaparte has left me with a series of myths about the war which still haunt me as though they were great art. Le Livre blanc? Christopher had heard about it long before he read it, and was a bit disappointed. Cocteau’s love act with the boy through the transparent mirror is the only image which has remained with me. Christopher wrote a blurb for The City and the Pillar, but he didn’t really like it, even then; he much preferred Williwaw. Capote’s books have always seemed to me to be mere skillful embroidery, unrelated to himself and therefore lacking in essential interest. Christopher never truly appreciated McCullers until he worked on a screenplay based on Reflections, in the sixties. It is, in many ways, like a French novel and owes a lot to Faulkner. But McCullers has something that Faulkner and the French haven’t––fun. The Stranger is a French novel and nothing but a French novel; one of the classic bogus masterpieces of this century. Christopher had been put onto Compton-