“A GENIUS FOR ENJOYING HIMSELF”
January 19, 1939.
“Well,” Christopher Isherwood said as he boarded the French liner, Champlain, in Southampton, bound for New York, “we’re off again.”
“Goody,” replied his travelling companion and friend since childhood, W.H. Auden.1
The two had heard the rumbles of war growing closer and been part of the artistic drain from England that so distressed Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson. The loss of these two men was especially devastating; Connolly considered Auden the country’s “one poet of genius,” and Isherwood as “the hope of English fiction.”2
Auden adapted quickly to New York City, but Isherwood was baffled. “Oh God, what a city!” he wrote to his English publisher soon after arriving; “The nervous breakdown expressed in terms of architecture. The sky-scrapers are all Father-fixations. The police-cars are fitted with air-raid sirens, specially designed to promote paranoia. The elevated railway is the circular madness.”3 He hadn’t a clue how he could earn a living there. And he was tormented by doubts about why he had left England. He considered himself a pacifist, but questioned why: were his beliefs sincere or was he really fleeing the dangers of serving his country?
A letter from Gerald Heard, a friend of Auden’s who had met Isherwood in England, urged Christopher to come visit him in Los Angeles where he was studying Eastern mysticism, yoga and pacifism. Heard, who had been a science commentator for the BBC and the author of books on religion and human consciousness, had left England two years earlier with Aldous Huxley. Isherwood welcomed his invitation. “If you couldn’t get hold of Bernard Shaw,” Isherwood once said of Heard, “perhaps he was the next best thing ...the most fascinating person I’ve ever met.”4 With a desire to explore more deeply the core of his beliefs on war and peace, and with the hope that he could earn a living writing for the movies, Isherwood left on a Greyhound bus on a sightseeing trip across the country, arriving in Los Angeles later in May.
Isherwood found the dandy he remembered from England looking emaciated, sporting a long beard and a painter’s smock over his dungarees and sneakers, and engaging in endless, though erudite and spell binding, monologues on pacifism and asceticism, spreading a gospel that “to become a true pacifist, you had to find peace within yourself; only then, he said, could you function pacifistically in the outside world.”5 Heard was a student of Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy, and followed a daunting regime of meditating six hours a day, interspersed with yoga and a diet, which consisted primarily of raisins, raw carrots, and tea. Isherwood was fascinated and receptive, and over the course of extended conversations, become intrigued by this Eastern religion. He had happened upon it at just the right time in his life. “To seek to realize my essential nature is to admit that I am dissatisfied with my nature as it is at present,” Isherwood would write later when he had reached a point of being able to articulate what he was experiencing. “It is to admit that I am dissatisfied with the kind of life I am leading now.”6 Embracing this philosophy led to prolonged self analysis and reflection in an attempt to cease to be himself and to understand the very core of his being. When Heard felt Isherwood was ready, he introduced him to Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk and the founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. At the same time, Isherwood found employment in Hollywood working on M-G-M movie scripts.
A year later, two more émigrés from England met up with Isherwood.
Denny and Jean had landed in New York City early in the summer of 1940, and on one of their whims took yoga classes together—and together, a few weeks later, made their way to Los Angeles. As Christopher Isherwood recalled it, on August 13 “a young American named Denny Fouts had arrived in Los Angeles.”7
Isherwood invited Jean and Denny, along with a mutual friend, Tony Bower, an American film correspondent who had been introduced to Isherwood in 1937 by Jean and Cyril Connolly, to join him for lunch at the Beverly Brown Derby “with its atmosphere of overstuffed dullness and melancholy midday rum.”8 Christopher found Jean to be thinner than the last time he had seen her, “really beautiful with her big gentle cow eyes.”9 He looked at Denny as if examining an alien creature. As he wrote in his diary:
If I try to remember how Denny struck me ...I think of the lean, hungry, tanned face, the eyes which seemed to be set on different levels, slightly overlapping, as in a late Picasso painting; the bitter little rosebud mouth; the strangely erect walk, almost paralytic with tension. He had rather sinister clothes—wash-leather jerkins, bell-bottomed sailor’s trousers, boxer’s sweaters. They were sinister because they were intended for laughing, harmless boys, not as a disguise for this tormented addict, this wolf-like inverted monk, this martyr to pleasure. His good-looking profile was bitterly sharp, like a knife edge; his Floridian drawl seemed a sinister affection. Goodness he was sour! For a while, his sourness was stimulating: then you began to feel as if you were suffering from quinine poisoning.10
Denny described himself to Isherwood “as having been a spectacularly successful homosexual whore.” Isherwood had heard that he had “had a number of affairs with rich men and that they had given him a lot of money. He made much of this, speaking of having been ‘kept’ by them, and watching your face as he used the word to see if you would wince.”11 Christopher later would realize that Denny “laid the whore act on rather thickly” and that, in many ways, he was very much like the Sally Bowles character in the novel he had written the year before, Goodbye to Berlin: “they both tended to play-act their lives.”12 Both Jean and Denny had hangovers when Christopher met them, “which they nursed with the greatest satisfaction; while steadily tanking up for the next blind.”13
Isherwood would turn thirty-five later that month. Already an acclaimed author, his fiction was regarded as avant garde, groundbreaking, at the forefront of a new school of literature—the documentary novel. At the beginning of Goodbye to Berlin, (much later popularized as the musical and film Cabaret), Isherwood wrote his famous line: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Indeed, the basis of all his writing was autobiography, and he placed himself—often as a character named “Christopher,” or even “Christopher Isherwood”—in much of his fiction. His diaries and memoirs contain the contemporaneous material that would become his novels, and the novella he would write about Denny is like a home movie of their lunch that day in August, and a recording of their next five years together. It was in 1949 that Isherwood first contemplated writing a short story about Denny, but not until March of 1956 that his ideas about Denny had begun to crystallize so that he could write to a friend: “As regards the novel, I have started it—half a page! Virgil is definitely to be Denny Fouts.”14 He would work on this book for four more years.
“Paul,” the fourth and final section of what would become this novel, Down There on a Visit, opens in the autumn of 1940 with the narrator, named Christopher, in a restaurant in Los Angeles having lunch with Ronny, a character based on Tony Bower, Ruthie, who was Jean Connolly, and Paul, who was now Denny, and so is the camera-like account of the author’s first encounter with Denham Fouts. In Down There on a Visit, the author provides a snapshot of Denny as Paul, almost a word-for-word repetition of his first entry about Denny in his diaries:
the lean, hungry-looking tanned face, the eyes which seemed to be set on different levels, as in a Picasso painting; the bitter, well-formed mouth. His handsome profile was bitterly sharp, like a knife edge. And goodness, underneath the looks and the charm and the drawl, how sour he was! The sourness of Paul’s could sometimes be wonderfully stimulating and bracing, especially as an antidote to sweetness and light. But I learned by experience to take it in cautious doses. Too much of it at one time could make you feel as if you were suffering from quinine poisoning.15
Isherwood’s video-prose captures Paul’s/Denny’s “strangely erect walk; he seemed almost paralytic with tension. He was always slim, but then he looked boyishly skinny; and he was dressed like a boy in his teens, with an exaggerated air of innocence which he seemed to be daring us to challenge.” In the story, we see Paul/Denny “in his drab black suit, narrow-chested and without shoulder padding, clean white shirt and plain black tie [that] made him look as if he had just arrived in town from a strictly religious boarding school. His dressing so young didn’t strike me as ridiculous, because it went with his appearance. Yet, since I knew he was in his late twenties, this youthfulness itself had a slightly sinister effect, like something uncannily preserved.”16
The author’s camcorder prose caught the sound of Denny’s voice as having a “peculiar drawling tone, which is probably the result of mixing a Southern accent with the kind of pseudo-Oxford English spoken by cultured Europeans—the people he has been running around with during the past few years.”17
These descriptions of Paul in the novel faithfully mirror Isherwood’s first impressions of Denny recorded in his diary. His portrayal of Paul’s character is just as faithful a depiction of Denny’s character.
At the chapter’s opening lunch, Paul is playing it cool, trying to act unimpressed by the fact that he is dining with a well known writer who is making good money in Hollywood, and, at the same time, trying to catch Christopher’s attention. Paul’s legend has preceded him, and the narrator is very much aware that this boyishly handsome man across the table is “the most expensive male prostitute in the world”; the narrator asks himself, “Do I care? Part of me already disapproves of Paul; part of me is bored by the tedious naughtiness of his legend. But, so far, I haven’t reached my verdict. I’m waiting to see if he’ll do anything to interest me; and I almost believe he knows this. I feel, at any rate, that he’s capable of knowing it. That’s what intrigues me about him.”18
This exploration of character is at the heart of Isherwood’s chapter: a study of Paul, and so, of Denny, penetrating deep into the psyche of this unusual individual. As he worked on his book, the author’s aim was “to keep to the fore the whole relationship between Paul & me. I see it as a sort of dialogue, a love-affair on the metaphysical plane. Something that goes deeper than surface-personality.”19 The story is a study of subtle human interaction, of those who, thinking they know someone, make certain assumptions about him, and of their willingness, or unwillingness, to alter those assumptions as circumstances shift. While the narrator watches Paul change, or seem to change, his understanding of Paul changes, develops, solidifies, then changes once again, and then again, as this quiet narrative unfolds.
At the lunch, Christopher senses that Paul is trying to impress him and realizing this, acts as if he is bored by Paul. The conversation turns to Christopher’s study of yoga with Augustus Parr, a well known guru—a character Isherwood closely modeled after Gerald Heard. Paul mentions that he has read a book of Parr’s. This arouses Christopher’s curiosity, the two begin talking about the book, and Christopher is floored by Paul’s perceptive remarks about it.
This was just as it happened. Isherwood had at first found Denny tiresome, but became intrigued when he showed a sincere interest in Vedanta and the Swami. “Long conversations with him had gradually convinced me that his interest was absolutely serious. It seemed to be related to some terrifying insights he had had while taking drugs.”20
In the novel, Christopher asks Paul how long he’s been interested in this subject. “I never said I was interested. As a matter of fact, I think all that stuff’s a lot of crap. I know it is.” Their prickly exchange continues on, and Christopher, fed up, hopes never to see Paul again.
Two weeks later, Paul calls him at the Hollywood studio where he works, telling him that Ruthie misses him, and adding “I want to see you, too.” Christopher is ready to brush him off when Paul utters the magic words: “You’re the only one who can help me, Christopher.”21 This caught Christopher’s attention (just as Glenway Wescott knew it would when, years before in New York City, he had advised Denny how to work his way into someone’s life). Paul insisted that he couldn’t discuss the matter on the phone, that Christopher would have to come to the bungalow that he, Ruthie, and Ronny were renting.
When he arrived, Ruthie and Paul were sunbathing, nude, on mattresses around the edge of an empty pool, and three young men, Marines, were there with them, in underwear and swim trunks, drinking beer. Paul told Christopher to take off his clothes: “If you don’t, Ruth’ll think you’re ashamed of your small pecker.”22 Fed up with Paul’s teasing and testing banter, Christopher announces he is leaving. At this point, Paul walks with him into the house and gets right to the point, asking Christopher if he believed any of what they were talking about the other week at lunch. The two start debating eastern philosophy, Christopher explaining it, Paul challenging it, at times seeming to heckle Christopher, at other times seeming sincerely interested. (“What makes you think it’s [life] for anything?” Paul questions: “Why can’t it just be a filthy mess of meaningless shit?”)23 In the course of the conversation, Christopher reveals that he’s begun mediating, which fascinates Paul and leads to further questioning. (“So you just sit there? I know I’d start thinking about all the people I’d had in my entire life. I’d end by jacking myself off.”)24 Christopher patiently described how “you sit there, and, all of a sudden, you know you’re face to face with something. You can’t see it, but it’s right there.” Paul is curious, but skeptical. “Well, personally, I’ve always stuck to what I can see and touch and smell and grope and screw. That’s all you can really trust. The rest’s just playing around with words until you talk yourself into something. I don’t say these mystics of yours are deliberate fakes. But they can’t prove to me that they’re not kidding themselves.”25
Here continues the debate—both explicit and implicit—that runs through this story, a debate between the spiritual side of life, represented by the new world Christopher is discovering, and the earthy side of the world, represented by Paul’s past, a past of groping and screwing. Why, Christopher questions, had Paul asked him to come that afternoon: “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” “Nothing,” Paul answers.26
But several nights later, long after he is asleep, Christopher’s telephone rings. It is Paul, sounding distraught, telling him he will be there in fifteen minutes. He arrives, disheveled, dirty, with one eye blackened. He has been in a fight with one of the Marines Christopher had seen around the pool the afternoon he visited; Paul says he has fallen out with Ruthie and Ronny and realizes “they simply hate my guts. So I told them I was getting out. And I got out.”27 Paul has with him a bottle of sleeping pills he has stolen from Ronny, and is making references to killing himself. “Until yesterday evening,” Paul explains, “there was always something left to stop me from being certain—some tiny little things, like feeling curious about a movie we were going to see, or about what I’d eat for dinner, or just what was going to happen next. Well, yesterday I suddenly found I’d come to the end of all that.”28 Pretty thin reeds to keep oneself alive, and Christopher, not at all sure that Paul’s declaration is anything more than late night theatrics, asks why he doesn’t just take the pills, asking him if he is too scared to do it. “Hell, no! Not that. Scared of what’s going to happen afterwards.”29 He is concerned that what is after death might be worse than the present. Christopher tests him: “Then don’t risk it. Stay alive.” Paul reveals the depth of his emptiness:
“I used to be good for something—for sex. I was really good for that. All kinds of people used to get hot pants for me, and that excited me—even when I found them totally unattractive, which I usually did. I got a terrific kick out of giving them pleasure, and was proud that I nearly always could. But then, by degrees, the whole thing got more and more frantic. I began to feel I’d got to go on and on and on having sex, even when I was exhausted. And then I realized I loathed sex. I was trying to screw it right out of my system.”30
Paul admits that he has been impotent for several months. “I mean absolutely impotent. I can’t even get it hard.”31 He had tried to cover up his condition, but Ruthie and Ronny had found out. Christopher taunts him, assuming that this midnight confession is simply another of Paul’s cries for attention. “We’re all supposed to fall down on our asses with amazement because you’re such a devilishly wicked Dorian Gray. Actually, you’re a rather vulgar little not-so-young boy from the most unpleasant state in the Union, whose chief claim to sophistication is having been thrown out of a few European hotels.”32 At that outburst, Paul stalks from the apartment, and Christopher, concerned that he may have misjudged him and gone too far, runs after him and leads him back inside. The two have breakfast, and Christopher calls his guru, Augustus Parr, to make an immediate appointment for him to meet with Paul.
The yogi spends the day with Paul. In their meditations, Paul goes through a violent sort of catharsis, rolling on the floor, crying in spasms, and finally relaxing, asking Augustus Parr, “Why did you do that to me?”33 Augustus reports to Christopher that “there’s a very curious expression in the eyes—you see it sometimes in photographs of wild animals at bay. But one also saw something else—which no animal has or can have—despair. Not helpless, negative despair. Dynamic despair. The kind that makes dangerous criminals, and, very occasionally, saints.”34 How close those two extremes are Isherwood explores in this story, how they can shift and flicker back and forth. Augustus Parr tells Christopher that he feels progress has been made during his day spent with Paul, but that only Christopher can help him.
The next morning Christopher is awakened by a call from Ronny to go bail Paul out of jail; he had wrecked his car that night and been arrested for drunk driving. Christopher realizes that, for better or worse, he is stuck with Paul, that Paul is his problem. He learns that Paul has no money, that he has expected to “live off Ruthie, I guess. Till someone else showed up.”35 That day, as he meditates, Christopher wonders “Does anything happen by accident? Augustus said No. Paul and I had met because we needed each other. Yes, now I suddenly saw that; I needed Paul every bit as much as he needed me. Our strength and our weakness were complimentary. It would be much easier for us to go forward together than separately. Only it was up to me to take the first step.”36 Christopher, through his meditation, feels a brotherly love for Paul. He invites him to stay at his apartment, and, inspired, gives him half of all the money he has in his bank account, with no strings attached.
And so began the characters’ monastic, celibate life together, which mirrors Christopher’s and Denny’s months together, beginning with an hour of meditation at six a.m., followed by breakfast, then lessons when they read aloud to each other from a book recommended by their yogi, more meditation at noon, a light lunch, a walk or drive (“while we were in the car, the one who wasn’t driving would read aloud to the other. This was supposed to distract our minds and eyes from attractive pedestrians; actually, it had the opposite effect; our glances became furtively compulsive and we had several near collisions”37), a vegetarian supper. “This was certainly one of the happiest periods of my life. The longer I lived with Paul, the more I became aware of a kind of geisha quality in him; he really understood how to give pleasure, to make daily life more decorative and to create enjoyment of small occasions.”38 This was, in fact, precisely Denny’s gift.
While Paul is at the dentist one morning, Christopher takes a call for him from the Railway Express office that “they had a picture to deliver.” Paul knows what it is: “‘Oh, sure—that’s my Picasso,’ he said casually. ‘They’ve certainly taken their time getting it here, I must say. It was stored in New York. I sent for it soon after I moved in with you. It’ll brighten the place up a bit.’” When it arrives it is “enormous—at least for our apartment—over six feet long and about four feet wide; a tall narrow painting of a giant girl seated at a high-legged table. The girl had a violet face, two noses, hands like the wings of birds and a crown of pale poisonous-looking flowers.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “It really is a Picasso!”
“Well, of course, it is, honey chile! Did you think your old Aunt would tote a reproduction around? This is my last and only souvenir of Europe.’” In the novel, the Condesa has given it to Paul just before he left for the United States. “‘It used to hang in her bedroom and I always liked to wake up with it in the morning ...”39
Christopher and Paul go together on a ten day retreat with Augustus Parr and twelve more of his followers to a campsite near Palm Springs. With the group were two beautiful teenage girls, one of whom, Dee-Ann, begins flirting with Paul, wrestling with him, telling him: “Do you know what Alanna said about you once? She said you were beautiful,”40 riding horses with him, swimming with him. On the last day of the retreat, Alanna goes to her parents and tells them she has “seen Paul with Dee-Ann, through the window of [Christopher’s] cabin, in an act of sex.”41 Paul then is seen speeding away from the site in Christopher’s car. When he returns, Paul is confronted, and doesn’t deny the allegations. Paul accuses Christopher of making his mind up about what has happened based on what others have told him, even before he has spoken with him. On the drive back to Los Angeles, Paul tells Christopher that he hasn’t done anything. “But, Paul, wait a minute—why did you tell them you’d done it?” Christopher asks. “I did not tell them. I just didn’t deny it. And why the hell should I? They all believed I did it from the word go. They were just hearing what they’d been expecting to hear all along.”42 Dee-Ann’s sister later confesses that Dee-Ann has fabricated the entire story.
Paul, who has filed as a conscientious objector, receives an order from his draft board directing him to report to forestry camp. At the camp, Paul is a favorite of the others who are fascinated by his tales of Europe and by his dog, Gigi, the only dog in the camp, “huge and shaggy and sloppy-tongued,”43 but the Quaker directors of the camp are quite concerned about Paul’s habit of playfully addressing the others as “Darling ... and ... Lover Boy”; they are relieved to discover he has a heart murmur, which they use as reason to have him, after two years at the camp, reclassified as 4-F and discharged.
On their ride home from the camp, Paul questions Christopher about whether he is still dedicated to the principles of yoga and learns that Christopher is now taking a more relaxed approach, meditating only on occasion, not following a strictly vegetarian diet, and having sex whenever he feels like it. Paul chastises Christopher for reverting to just what he was before he began to alter his life, and tells him, “I know what I really want now. I discovered that up at camp. I don’t want any more of this auto hypnotism and professional goodness. I’m sick of trying to imagine I feel things. I just want to know.”44 He tells Christopher he has decided to become a psychoanalyst, that he has taken correspondence courses while at camp and gotten his high school diploma, that he’ll be starting a pre-med program in New York City in the fall, and that he will be leaving in a few days. Christopher is astounded. “Paul,” I said, and I meant it, “you’re the most amazing person I know.”45
Augustus Parr also is astonished, delighted at the news. “That will of his!” Augustus exclaimed. “My word! It would move mountains undoubtedly.”46 Christopher isn’t so sure Paul will be able to follow through and complete the necessary courses. “For I had just realized one fact about his motivations: he could only do things—even altogether constructive things, like getting a medical degree—against someone else. There always had to be an enemy, whose role it was to lack faith in Paul and be proved wrong. And Paul’s latest enemy wasn’t the Quakers or Augustus, or the people he had known in Europe, or Ruthie or Ronny; it was me.”47
It isn’t until the summer of 1946 that Christopher receives a letter from Paul, telling him that he has sold the Picasso, that he is leaving New York and going to Europe “perhaps for a long while,” and that he has given up medical school “because I have realized that I’ll never be a good psychologist until I’ve understood certain things for myself. I don’t mean just by getting myself analyzed; I mean by living through them again.”48 Christopher later hears from friends in Europe that Paul is being seen in all his regular haunts “doing all the usual things with the usual people.”49 Christopher wonders if Paul had gained anything from their sojourn together.
This quiet story is an exploration of how reality can emerge only through the diminution of self. Paul is there to test, to challenge, to poke at the new reality Christopher thinks he is discovering. Once, in a lecture, Isherwood said that “Paul is a touchstone of sincerity, without meaning to be ... without being any better himself, he has the most awful faculty of exposing that tiny little bit of untruth that there is in almost all of us.”50 There are no absolutes in the story, no moral judgments. In an interview in 1961, Isherwood called the book “a loosely constructed fictional autobiography, something in the manner of Goodbye to Berlin,”51 and in an interview ten years later, he continued this analogy, comparing Paul/Denny to Sally Bowles.52
The plot of “Paul” follows precisely Christopher’s own experiences with Denny from their first lunch at the Beverly Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles with Jean Connolly and Tony Bower. Isherwood found that Denny wished to make a clean break with the life he had been leading in Europe before the War, and a few weeks after their first meeting recorded his thoughts in his diary:
Lunch with Denny, who is anxious to start a new life as soon as the Swami gets back. He means to take a big plunge—get a shack in the hills, a menial job (as somebody’s servant) and immediately renounce everything: sex, drink, and the Gang. He’s very nervous and much worried about his motives—is he wishing to do this for the right reasons? But surely, at the start, the reasons don’t matter? If you are doing this for the wrong reasons, I told him, you’ll very soon find out. Meanwhile, Denny still goes to parties and gets drunk and talks nothing but religion, to the great amusement of Tony Bower and Jean Connolly, who call him “the drunken yogi.”53
By later in October of 1940, Christopher thought Denny ready for a visit to the Vedanta temple and together they sat in the shrine. “I couldn’t concentrate,” Christopher remembers, “I was thinking all the time of Denny—hoping he wouldn’t be put off by the photographs on the shrine, and the flowers, and the ivory and brass figures of Krishna, Buddha and Shiva. It does look rather like the mantelpiece in an old-fashioned boudoir. Actually, Denny liked it all very much, but was dismayed because he had thought what a wonderful place it would be to have sex in.”54
Isherwood acknowledged in his diaries that he “had become possessive of Denny, regarding him as my personal convert, the soul I had saved.”55 Certainly his conversion of such an infamous character, such a notorious reprobate, would have impressed his guru and added immeasurably to his stature in the eyes of Swami Prabhavananda. But Denny’s meeting with Isherwood’s guru was a disaster: “he must have been aggressive and theatrical and strident, painting himself as the lowest of sinners and daring Prabhavananda to reject him.” The guru told him that what he really needed was not spiritual guidance but to go out and get a job, to work. Isherwood records that “Denny was terribly disappointed and hurt. As soon as we got back to his room, he threw himself down on the bed and burst into tears, sobbing that he was rotten, everybody despised him, and he’d better kill himself with heroin as soon as possible ...”56 Christopher tried to calm him. “I protested, of course—as anybody would. In fact, I said far more than I meant. I told him that I didn’t despise him, that I admired him and liked him and wanted to be his friend. This episode had very far-reaching consequences ...It ...involved me with Denny—so that, in a little while, I really did become very fond of him.”57
To carry out Swami’s recommendation, Gerald Heard arranged for Denny to work at an organic farm in Pennsylvania so that Denny could learn the principles of farming and then help put them into practice in the monastic community that Gerald was planning. While he was at the farm, Denny sent daily letters to Gerald and Christopher. “Denny was trying to live entirely without sex, and his lurid accounts of his temptations and struggles made Gerald exclaim repeatedly, ‘My word, what a tough!’ Denny was certainly the white-haired boy of our little circle. We all went around discussing him, raving about him and dwelling with frissons of excitement on the awful life of sin he had lived before his ‘change.’ We were pretty ridiculous, no doubt—like church spinsters cooing over a converted burglar.”58
By the spring of 1941, Denny, who despised the farmer and everything about life on the farm, returned to California, and Isherwood invited him to stay at his apartment until he was drafted. Isherwood reasoned that it would be good to live with Denny “because he’s the only person who can view my life as a whole, and therefore the only one who can give me any valuable advice. He isn’t shocked by the squalid bits of it, and he isn’t repelled or mystified by Vedanta.” There of course was a downside to living with Denny: “Denny’s company is very disturbing to me, a lot of the time. Because his life is free, bohemian, agreeable and full of affairs.”59 With Isherwood’s declaration of friendship with no sexual strings attached—the sort of friendship Denny had never before known—Denny expressed his determination “to start meditating and living ‘intentionally.’”60
The two had decided to undertake together what they called an experiment in “intentional living.” Their days together fell into a pleasing routine. When the morning alarm rang, Christopher awakening in his bedroom and Denny in the living room each began an hour of meditation. Denny then washed, dressed, and prepared breakfast (“he was,” Isherwood commented, “an inventive cook and he had the knack of homemaking”61), while Christopher washed and dressed. At that time, the silence was broken when they said “good morning.” After doing the dishes and whatever housekeeping was necessary, they read to each other from a religious text, books like William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, books that they often criticized and mocked. “Mary, how pretentious can you get?” and “How she dare!”, were among Denny’s favorite put-downs of the authors.62 About God, Denny once said, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”63 Like Paul in Down There on a Visit, he always was detecting inconsistencies and dishonesties in what people said, and was quick to pin someone as a phony. Christopher at times “egged Denny on in order to be able to enjoy the contrast of someone even sourer than myself.”64
The second hour of meditation commenced at noon, followed by lunch. As in “Paul,” “If we went out in the car during the afternoon, we took our book with us and the nondriver read it to the driver. This was supposed to keep us from watching for sexy pedestrians. It didn’t, but it did divide the driver’s attention by three—book, pedestrian, road—instead of by two, and was therefore cause of several near accidents.”65 The third hour of meditation was from six to seven o’clock, followed by supper and to bed by nine-thirty. “We had agreed that we would give up sex, including masturbation. This was made easier by the fact that we didn’t find each other in the least sexually attractive. However, while keeping to the agreement, we talked about sex constantly, boasting of our past conquests and adventures.”66
Isherwood would look back on these days with Denny as among the most joyful in his life. “On the whole, those weeks of May and June were unexpectedly happy ... The day lived itself, our timetable removed all anxieties about what we should be doing next. We were continually occupied, and everything we did seemed enjoyable and significant. The apartment was curiously delightful to be in, because of the atmosphere we were creating. I don’t remember our having one real quarrel.”67
Isherwood came to see that there was no one more fun to be with than Denham Fouts. In everything he did, Denny could reveal to others the wonder of being alive, he could find the extraordinary in the most ordinary parts of the day. Like Paul in Christopher’s novella, Denny could make “the marketing seem fascinatingly important; he chose fruits and vegetables as carefully as if they were neckties or socks.”68 Isherwood would later remember these months when “we really relied on each other”69 as “some of the happiest of my whole life.70 Everything we did seemed interesting and amusing. The apartment acquired a kind of nursery atmosphere of innocence.”71
Their friends had doubts about what they were doing, convinced that after a number of weeks they would come to their senses and realize all the religious mumbo jumbo they were spouting was so much nonsense. They especially hoped “that Denny will have a relapse and return to his old ways. Denny causes more resentment than any of us because he is a traitor to the gang, and because everybody had him so neatly taped as a drunken, doping sex maniac. Denny’s desertion is very disturbing.”72 Isherwood felt that “Denny contributed more to the success of our experiment than I did, both materially and morally ... As I now see, this was because he had much more to lose than I had if we failed. This was the last bridge he hadn’t burned ...”73
Through Aldous Huxley, they found a teacher of hatha-yoga exercises, which they practiced “for purely athletic reasons; ...the exercise did make us feel wonderfully healthy.”74 Christopher’s Swami disapproved of these lessons.
“‘What is the matter with you, Mr. Isherwood?’ he asked me reproachfully, ‘surely you do not want Eternal Youth?’
I was silent and hung my head—because, of course, I did.”75
Like any eager beginner learning a new skill, Denny in those spring days of 1941 kept careful notes of his first meeting with their yoga instructor, who, as Isherwood described, “though perhaps a lot older than she looked, was the embodiment of suppleness and serpentine charm.”76 Their lessons were each Thursday afternoon at 4:30 p.m., and Denny in his notebook recorded just what they were to practice on their own:
stretches—prone 3 ea
alternate breathing sitting cross-legged, separate nostrils. At end hold breath long as pos. let out slowly 12 rounds
Balance on Coccyx—shakes—(tuch up) 6 rounds
Spine-rock (ironing) (many as we like)
Abdominal on elbows with knee up—20 times swallow air before
Same on hands and knees (cat hump)
Their instructor, they found, was “a perfect lady” who “never lost her social poise. Having explained that the air which is passed through the body in the air-swallowing exercise should come out ‘quite odorless’ she merely smiled in playful reproach when we discharged vile-smelling farts.”77
Another page of Denny’s handwritten notes sketched out a regime of alternate breathing exercises, from the “Hollow tank (3),” the “Jackknife—6 at least to 12 as many as we can,” to a shoulder stand and “abdominals—swallow air + water—prone on elbows, knees up (20) + cat hump—(20).” For the next lesson on Tuesday at four o’clock they were to read the book “Heaven Lie Within Us—Bernard.” Another session featured the “cork-screw rock,” the “inch worm from above into snake + back,” and the “snake posture,” all of which was to be practiced “1/2 hr morning and 1/2 hr evening.” Denny’s notes for another routine began with: “1. Run on beach—swim if warm enough,” to “a chair + stool push-up” to “Belly punch,” “the tuch” and “beauty roll.”
The lessons became more advanced. As Christopher noted: “Our teacher began to urge us to learn the yoga technique of washing out the intestines by muscular action alone; you squat in a bowl full of water, suck the water in through the anus, swirl it around inside you, expel it again, thus cleansing yourself of poisons. Until this technique had been mastered you should use an enema everyday. And meanwhile, the sphincter muscle of the anus must be made more flexible, through dilation ... A set of rectal dilators now appeared. The largest was a wicked-looking dildo, quite beyond my capacity but dangerously tempting to my curiosity. I told Denny that, at least as far as I was concerned, our lessons would have to stop—lest sex should sneak in through the back door.”78 That ended their formal sessions, but they continued some of the exercises they had learned.
It was not surprising that, living with an author, Denny was beguiled by the writer’s life and the potential monetary rewards of telling stories; surely he had lived more than a lifetime’s worth of fiction. It was during these idyllic days with Christopher, between meditating and exercising, that he tried his hand at writing a novel.
“Chap. I” he wrote in his confident, neat script on a page of lined school notebook paper, and then began:
Two men [Denny crossed out those first two words and gave the two men names, inserting Eduardo and Sefton]—watched the New York plane take form in the early morning California haze and settle in front of the Glendale Airport. They both had hangovers and had eaten no breakfast but were drinking splits of sour domestic champagne on the visitors Terrace to celebrate Prim’s arrival.79
The two men had anticipated this moment and had dressed the part for Prim’s benefit since she jokingly had accused them of having “gone Hollywood.”
Denny’s amateur, first draft efforts become apparent in the next few overwritten sentences; he is dealing with an interesting insight but is having trouble weaving it into the narrative. In describing how the men dressed for Prim, he wrote:
This was more than affectation, however, and in fact formed a fundamental aspect of their whole attitude toward America. For, although they were citizens, they had spent most of their lives abroad, and when the war reminded them forcibly of their birthright, their resentment at having to take advantage of it knew no bounds. They openly pretended to a tolerant but incorruptible hatred of everything American to cover up the guilt of their compromise with a profound aversion to their roots. California was considered to contain a more concentrated essence of the “soul destroying” qualities of America then [sic] anywhere else. Eduardo and Sefton’s clothes were to indicate that, although immersed, they were immune and could still laugh with the most contemptuous.
At the bottom right corner of this first page, and each page thereafter of the manuscript, Denny carefully recorded his word count.
Prim gets off the plane in an outfit that more than matched the mens’: high-heeled sandals made of clear plastic, red pajamas, and large sunglasses. Again, Denny analyzes the scene: “This combination suggested to all three the ultimate esoteric comment on Hollywood, and so exquisitely complimented the sartorial efforts of the two men that for a while they floated giddily on a wave of mirth which carried them high above their individual considerations, isolating them from the rest of the world in an impenetrable cell of sly, superior intimacy.”
Rather than telling a story, rather than letting his characters’ personalities emerge through their actions and words and having a narrative unfold through the characters, Denny is filling in the missing pieces for the reader, and in doing so, is bogging down the story. “Prim rather fancied herself in her ‘get-up,’ however, and no flattery was ever too gross to be absorbed by a physical vanity which was the only portion of her ego that Eduardo and Sefton provided no nourishment for whatsoever. It was the only deficiency in their relationship and what disharmony existed between them was chiefly caused by Prim’s extra-relational satisfaction of this need and the two men’s resentment and ridicule of it.”
The three climb into Eduardo’s new Cadillac roadster. It becomes clear through their conversation that Eduardo and Prim have been lovers, sharing “spells of almost religious intimacy—that is, when they were not actually fighting,” though we learn a little later that Prim is married to a RAF officer who has been missing in action in Libya, though none of the three friends “could care less if he was dead or alive.” As they drive along Hollywood Boulevard, Eduardo concedes that the roadster isn’t paid for but that he was given the tires by a man who has asked Eduardo to cash some checks in the East, which Eduardo in turn has sent to Prim to put through her bank account; for his efforts in laundering this money, the man gave him a choice of tires and Eduardo buys the roadster to go with the new tires. Eduardo knows little about the man, other than “everyone in Hollywood knows him” and that the man knew Eduardo’s mother. Eduardo, the reader learns, is her only child, the son of her first husband who died on the Titanic. “(Lusitania?)” Denny writes in a parenthetical, a decision he would have to make later.
Eduardo’s mother “knew everyone in Europe, and that included Kings, Dictators and Prime Ministers. Her very intimate and indiscriminate relationships in this powered category was inexplicable to most people except in highly romantic terms and she was universally looked upon as a Dangerous Woman.” As the novel opens, she is living in Portugal and will not return to the United States until her protégé, a young Greek poet, receives a visa; although many of her friends assume the two are having an affair, the young poet is, as Denny describes him, “thoroughly homosexual.” Although she has never been close to her son, she is relying now on Eduardo to help her secure a visa for Niko, the poet.
Eduardo pulls the roadster into a parking lot and the three get out of the car just as a chauffeur in the parking lot opened the door of a gray Rolls Royce for a “small dark bald-headed jew dressed entirely in white”; Prim recognizes him and calls out “Pepe!” Pepe knows Eduardo also and asks Eduardo to join him in the Rolls so that they can talk as he is driven downtown. Reluctantly, Eduardo gets in Pepe’s car.
As Chapter 2 opens, Prim and Sefton follow their porter past a swimming pool to a bungalow, where apparently the three of them will be staying. They pour themselves drinks, and as Sefton watches Prim, “a great rush, of tenderness for her filled his heart, overwhelming him.” Denny continues: “‘Prim, darling, I do adore you,” he said feelingly as he snuggled down next to her. “This horrid place and all the boring [here Denny crossed out the word “boring” and inserted “horrid”] people—I can’t tell you, it’s too ghastly.” As Prim strokes Sefton’s hair, Sefton admits he is concerned about Eduardo, that he is acting differently.
Here the manuscript text gets out-of-order, and on a blank page Denny has written “notebooks like Chris,” perhaps a recognition of the value to Isherwood of his diary of daily jottings, observations, snatches of dialogue, character sketches that could be worked into a novel or feed a writer’s imagination.
The pages pick up with Sefton in a bar having dinner with a character named Boney, who, Sefton learns, is in California to arrest Pepe. Pepe, Boney explains to Sefton, is a spy involved in a Nazi sabotage plot: to dump a load of high explosives at Consolidated Aircraft sometime Tuesday night; Pepe would be there himself to master mind the plot, and would be arrested. At the same time, as Sefton is meeting with Boney, Eduardo and Prim are having lunch on the terrace with an unnamed king.
And there, after the sixty-eighth handwritten notebook page, ends the first and only draft of Denny’s novel.
Certainly Denny has introduced some characters and some plot lines with the potential to build a novel. The relationships between Eduardo, Sefton, and Prim are ambiguous, which lends a tension to the text. We know that Prim is married to a missing-in-action RAF officer and has also some romantic feelings for Eduardo. In the car, Eduardo puts his arm around Prim, “cuddling her in an extravagant display of affection which characterized their behavior toward each other in between their spells of almost religious intimacy.” Sefton, too, feels close to Prim: “Oh, Prim, darling, I do adore you,” Sefton had said to Prim, “feelingly as he snuggled down next to her.” It’s not yet clear what feelings Eduardo and Sefton may have for each other; in the car, “Sefton ruffles Eduardo’s hair and laughs happily like a child,” and, learning for the first time what Eduardo has done to get the new tires, Sefton “gave Eduardo’s head a little push.” Prim tells Sefton he should go away on a little vacation, and Sefton responds that “I don’t want to go anywhere unless Eddie comes with me.” Then there is the mysterious, secret agent man, Pepe, who has used Eduardo to launder money and may be involved in a Nazi sabotage plot, and Eduardo’s mother, who sounds very much like a female version of Denham Fouts, she who “knew everyone in Europe, and that included Kings, Dictators and Prime Ministers,” someone who was “universally looked upon as a Dangerous Woman.”
In these opening pages, Denny has set in motion a cast of characters able to carry several lines of intrigue, all of which could have been woven together into a novel: the relationship between the three friends; what Eduardo was doing for Pepe and why; whether Pepe was a Nazi sympathizer and would be exposed; whether Eduardo’s mother would get the visa for her protégé; how these different plot lines would intersect and resolve themselves.
All the seeds were there to germinate into a novel, but as Robert Louis Stevenson knew, this was just about as far as any amateur could get: “There must be something for hope to feed upon,” the great novelist wrote; “The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those hours when the words come and the phrases balance of themselves—even to begin. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the book shall be accomplished!” As Stevenson added: “Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills ... Human nature has certain rights; instinct—the instinct of self-preservation—forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hope to feed upon.”80 Like countless before him, Denny concluded after drafting a chapter or two that the writer’s life was not all it seemed, and certainly not as easy as it seemed, and, for him, not worth the effort.
These days of bliss, of living intentionally, ended on August 21, 1941, when Denny, who, like Paul, had filed as a conscientious objector, was called to report to a forestry camp in the mountains of San Dimas, about twenty miles outside of Los Angeles. “We spent a melancholy two weeks buying his ugly trousseau,” Christopher wrote in his diary, “the stiff blue denim work clothes and the clumsy boots ... I drove him as far as Glendora, where the camp director’s wife would come down to fetch him. As we approached the scene of parting, Denny began to talk nostalgically about Paris, and his former loves and triumphs.”81
Like Paul in Isherwood’s novel, Denny became a favorite of the others at the forestry camp. From the start, he enjoyed his months there, happy to find, as Isherwood noted, that “he could get along in a group and be accepted and popular. He spent money wildly, on all kinds of luxury equipment—waterproof wristwatches, super-sleeping-bags, fur-lined jackets—for himself and as presents for his friends.”82 Denny adopted a stray dog wandering around the camp, “huge and shaggy and sloppy-tongued,” just like Gigi in the novel. Trotsky became his life companion. Denny was the cook for the camp and in his free time was studying correspondence courses through UCLA to get his high school diploma, with the plan of then following a program of higher education to become a psychiatrist.
The directors of the camp weren’t quite certain what to make of such a worldly free spirit who had no regard for routines or authority. They reported to Isherwood that Denham Fouts was a “subversive influence”83 and accused him of bringing liquor and marijuana into the camp, accusations they were not able to prove. Their major concern was that Denny “has simply been talking about his gay [exciting] life in Paris and making them [the other men] discontented.”84 The directors were quite relieved when Denny was reclassified as medically unfit due to a heart murmur and discharged in the spring of 1943.
Like Paul in Down There on a Visit, Denny’s thinking had changed when he was away at the forestry camp; as he told Christopher as they sat at a bar, “I’ve decided to hold on to the things I can see.”85
Denny moved into an apartment above a restaurant on Entrada Drive, close to the beach in Santa Monica, enrolling in the University of California to prepare for his pre-medical examinations, with the hope of becoming a psychiatrist. Both Denny and Christopher realized that Denny had developed new goals and that their days of living together were no longer possible. “Denny is now going along a different road,” Christopher wrote in his diary. “His discipline is all built on his studying, which I can’t share.”86 As Christopher wrote to Gerald Heard: “Denny has two jobs: one daytime one, as a janitor, during which he studies algebra, Shakespeare and German for his high school diploma, which, in the rush of getting educated in other ways, he never stopped to take—and an evening job at a bookstore [The London Bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard.] We go swimming together every Saturday.”87
It was here on the beach at Santa Monica that Denny spotted a seagull staggering through the sand. The gull had a broken wing, and touched by its hapless plight, Denny “amputated it, which made the bird more comfortable but didn’t solve its problem.” Christopher followed it and saw how it couldn’t fly, couldn’t swim, and was being harassed by other gulls pecking at it. He killed it. “This made me feel horrible all day. I asked Swami, did I do right? and he said no, one shouldn’t interfere with the karma of any creature.”88 This didn’t convince Christopher, who rationalized that the only other option would have been to take the bird home and make it a pet.
Another day on the beach, Denny made a tail for a kite out of Christmas decorations. (“This sort of play project, undertaken on the spur of the moment, was characteristic of Denny,” Christopher noted.)89 A gust of wind off the ocean caught the kite, it dove, hit a power line by the highway, the tinsel ornaments short-circuited the line, the line sparked, flashed, exploded, fell across the road, cars swerved, brakes squealed, traffic backed up, the neighborhood was without power, the police came, and the kite flyers innocently joined the crowd of spectators. Like everyone else who had lived with him discovered, Denny made life a continuing adventure.
Often, too, they bicycled together. In June, while cycling around Beverly Hills, Denny “suggested we should look in on Lena Horne, the colored singer. She has a little house just above the Sunset Strip. They have become great friends. Denny opened the door and shouted, ‘Lena darling, I’ve brought a friend in to take a shower.’ Lena seemed to find this perfectly natural.”90 (While on leave from the forestry camp, Denny and his African-American friends from the camp would “often go down to night spots, in the colored part of town, and Denny is proud of being accepted in places where whites are not welcome.”)91
On their bicycling trips, Denny started composing a bicycling song to the tune of “Take a Pair Of Sparkling Eyes,” a song that began: “Just a pair of cycling queens/no longer in their teens.”92
Whenever Isherwood went to Santa Monica to visit, Denny “was very sweet and sympathetic. He suggested, as so often before, that I should come and live with him here, or that we’d go East together and he’d study at Columbia. But I can’t walk out on Swami right now. And Denny himself is so unsettled. I could never rely on him.”93 The two were co-dependent, aware of each other’s virtues and vices, each appreciative of the strengths of the other and needing them. As Christopher confided to his diary:
Being with Denny unsettles me, and yet I need him more than ever before ... He’s always getting in digs at Swami, whom he’s never forgiven, but he doesn’t suggest I should leave. His attitude was summed up the other day when he said “either make up your mind to be a monk or a dirty old man.” Sometimes I find this kind of brutality bracing; sometimes it just annoys me, because I know, and Denny knows, that he has no right to talk to me like this, when he isn’t faced with the same problem himself. If I were to leave [Swami], he’d be pleased in a way, because it would shock a lot of people he dislikes, and because he knows I could only turn to him and depend on him more than ever—most likely we’d live together again. But he’d also be a bit dismayed, I’m sure, because in a strange way he relies on me to do his praying for him; and he would love to be able to believe in my belief.94
When they were apart, Christopher had “a gnawing desire to go and see Denny and cry on his shoulder. He’s the only person I can discuss the situation with, quite frankly.”95 And then there was always that added benefit, knowing Denny was “waiting at home to cook a tasty evening meal.”96
So Christopher visited frequently. Tacked to the living room walls of Denny’s small, two bedroom and bath apartment were Army posters warning of the dangers of venereal disease. One showed a prostitute with the admonition: “She may be a bag of trouble.” The other poster was “a diagram of the penis, with dotted red lines to show the spreading of gonorrheal infection up the urethra and into the bladder.”97 Dominating the wall over the sofa was the huge Picasso that Peter Watson had entrusted to Denny before the War, “Girl Reading at a Table,” the portrait of Picasso’s twenty-four year old mistress so vividly described in Down There on a Visit. The rich colors of this large oil and enamel painting seemed illuminated by the light of the lamp on the table in the painting, with the deep shadows around the girl bending over the table to write giving a sense of quiet concentration to the scene. Denny was well aware of the beauty of this work, and, of its value, and once had stopped Christopher from throwing darts at it (Christopher had slept on the sofa under the painting and had a vivid nightmare about Nazi Germany, which he blamed on the girl in the painting),98 and had stopped, also, a reveler at one of his parties from slashing it with a broken glass. Christopher noted in his diary that “the frame of the Picasso is a bit more chipped,” and speculated “a fight?”99
Denny’s college career proved short-lived. Ten years older than his fellow freshman, he naturally excelled in his French courses, but the science and math classes he was required to take were beyond him. One of his classmates remembered: “at first he was very serious about his studies, saying that someday he wanted to go on to medical school. But after living adventurously in Europe, he simply couldn’t settle into the college routine. He was really too restless, too independent for college and, I think, already too old to change.”100 After a year, he dropped out with vague plans to resume his studies later.
It was not surprising Denny had a hard time concentrating on studying. His apartment had become the headquarters of a continuing party, with young friends coming and going all day and night. Jeff and Curly, who liked pot and porn and who Isherwood believed were capable of blackmail; Wallace and Howard, who lived in another of the upstairs front apartments who were always ready to participate in Denny’s schemes; Ken Angermayer who Isherwood described as “a strikingly attractive boy”101 who would become the acclaimed filmmaker and author of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger.
With Denny the host/circus master, these parties were bound to press the limits. At one, a naval officer and an army lieutenant were persuaded to strip and have sex on the couch under the Picasso as the other guests watched and critiqued.102 Once, Christopher received a call from George Cukor, the film director, to come to his house at once to speak with Somerset Maugham who at the time was staying there. The author looked up from writing and said in his stammer, “I think, C-Christopher, you’d b-better warn your friend Denham that his apartment is b-being watched by the p-police.”103 Apparently someone had alerted the police that teenage boys were entering and leaving Denny’s apartment at all hours. This report of the famed author’s warning delighted Denham, for he had bragged that in Europe, before the War, Maugham had been one of his admirers. When not at the apartment, Denny and his friends would drive up the coast to Thelma Todd’s, a notorious restaurant—part eating establishment, part casino, part brothel—frequented by Hollywood executives interested in meeting call girls in the establishment’s curtained alcoves.
One day Denny came to visit Christopher, bringing two friends with him. Isherwood recalled looking out his window and seeing the three get out of the car and the effect of his first glimpse of one of the young men, Bill Harris, an artist in his early twenties with a shock of blond hair and a swimmer’s physique, as “like a shot from an elephant gun” that made him “grunt” with desire. “When Denny and I were alone, I accused him of having maliciously introduced me to this beautiful temptation in order to seduce me away from the Vedanta Center. This was meant as a joke. Nevertheless, I knew that the young man’s image had been stamped upon my mind and would reappear at inconvenient moments, in the shrine room and elsewhere. It would be all the more disturbing because I realized already that he himself wasn’t unattainable.”104
On reflection, Christopher believed what he felt for Bill Harris was what he called “a sort of compulsive craze. Bill represented the Forbidden.”105 Isherwood was able to resist this temptation until some weeks later he happened to find himself standing next to Bill, pressed closed together in a crowded trolley car. When Denny took a trip to San Francisco and asked Bill to paint the living room of his apartment while he was gone, Christopher stayed there with Bill and so began their affair. Christopher rationalized his break with the mandates of Vedanta by regarding Bill as “one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which had to be overcome by temporarily yielding to it. ‘Let me go to bed with you so I can get tired of you.’”106
Looking back, years later, Christopher realized that Denny was a “myth figure” to him.
As he wrote in his diary:
he was Satan, the tempter, the easy-as-an-old-shoe friend who is so comfortable to be with because he knows the worst there is to know about you; the captive audience which holds its entertainers captive, demanding relentlessly to be surprised and amused. Christopher’s Satan held Christopher in his power by provoking Christopher to indiscretion. Having dared Christopher to start an affair with someone—”I bet you can’t get him,” Satan says—he wheedles and flatters Christopher into talking about the new lover. So Christopher finds himself giving a blow-by-blow and word-for-word description of their affair; and thus the affair turns into a theatrical performance.107
After Bill Harris moved to New York City, Christopher had an affair with Steve, his studio’s mail department messenger boy who was studying to become an actor. Denny rendered his pronouncement on Steve—”I think he’s quite beautiful, but let’s face it, he’ll always be a department store queen”108—and set about finding a suitable partner for his friend. Denny introduced him to Bill Caskey, just discharged from the Navy. Denny challenged Christopher to flirt with Caskey and see how far he could get. At a party at Denny’s apartment to celebrate Bill’s twenty-fourth birthday, Christopher took Bill away from the party to a store in town to buy a shirt for him as a birthday gift and then returned to the party, reporting to Denny that Bill had said he would come to Christopher’s home as soon as he left the party. He did and they spent that night together.
Isherwood admired Caskey’s outspokenness. At a dinner party at Charlie Chaplin’s house, Bill was seated next to Natasha Moffat, the wife of screenwriter Ivan Moffat. When she saw who her seating partner would be, she exclaimed, “Oh good, Billy! I always like sitting next to a pansy.” The room grew silent. “Your slang is out of date, Natasha,” Bill responded politely and with greater volume, “we can’t say ‘pansy’ nowadays. We say ‘cocksucker.’”109
To celebrate the end of the War and gas rationing, Christopher in September of 1945 bought a second-hand Lincoln Zephyr convertible, and would roar down the narrow roads of the Hollywood Hills with Denny and Bill in the back seat shrieking, Denny pretending “they were all a bunch of pleasure-mad teenagers of the 1920’s, drunk on bathtub gin,” and yelling “Let ’er rip!” and “Flaming youth!”110
At the end of September, Denny flew to New York City, having had crated and shipped ahead his Picasso; it was time to raise some money and he hoped to interest a dealer in Manhattan in buying the painting. Traveling “by air” was a glamorous but still new adventure, and Denny covered his bases. In his clean script, he wrote on a plain piece of paper:
To whom it may concern:
The picture “Girl Reading” by Picasso which is my property, having been given to me by Peter Watson, is to be the property of Christopher Isherwood in the event of my dying or disappearing before it is sold in consideration of debts I owe to him and because he is my [and here Denny inserted a carrot and added the word “best”] best friend.
He signed it L. Denham Fouts, and dated it September 20, 1945, with the address 137 Entrada Dr. Santa Monica beneath the date, and at the bottom of the page a line which read:
Witness: and signed by William E. Caskey111
In New York, Denny sold the Picasso to a man he met at a cocktail party who offered more for the painting, $9,500, than any of the dealers he had approached. (That buyer in turn sold it to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Marx of Chicago. It was Mrs. Marx—Florence May Schoenborg—heiress to the May Department Store chain fortune, who was an avid collector of modern art, and who, at her death in 1995, willed this painting, and a collection of others, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it hangs today as part of the permanent exhibit, a single painting from the collection Peter Watson had assembled, worth today well over fifty million dollars.)
When Denny returned from New York to California in the spring of 1946, Christopher and Bill were living in his apartment. Denny stayed with them, but it wasn’t long before Denny and Bill were quarrelling. Christopher believed Denny was jealous when he realized that his best friend and Bill were truly in love, that he had lost Christopher. Denny told Christopher that Bill was “just another boy, another pawn in the sexual chess game.”112 Christopher in his diary analyzed what happened:
And now Denny, that sly old chess player, had made a crude amateur mistake; he had challenged Caskey from a position of weakness. Caskey saw his advantage and pushed their quarrel to the point at which Christopher had to choose between them. Thus it was that Christopher’s friendship with Denny ended. Christopher was sorry, of course. Denny may have been sorry, too—yes, I’m sure he was. But he accepted the situation with his usual arrogant show of indifference. He was in one of his self-destructive moods, ready to break with anyone who wouldn’t submit to his will. Christopher, who was also capable of such moods, understood this perfectly. Though he had sided with Caskey, his sympathies remained with Denny. Looking back on the two relationships, it seems to me that Christopher and Denny came closer to each other than Christopher and Caskey ever did.113
Denny left the apartment, subletting it, went back East with Trotsky and from there to Europe.
Over three decades later, thinking about Denny, Christopher would reflect: “I liked Denny. He was witty, he could make me laugh, and he could instruct me how to live in this country ... And for all his reservations and sneerings about religion, he did take Vedanta seriously. He resisted it, he attacked it, he hated it: but he knew it wasn’t merely silly, a freaky game. He was a curiously serious person, despite his air of frivolity.”114
In Down There on a Visit, Isherwood expressed best his feelings about his friend: “I never in my life met anyone who was so much fun to be with ... He had a genius for enjoying himself.”115