Best-Kept Boy in the World (9 page)

“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