Lost Years by Christopher Isherwood

Author:Christopher Isherwood [Christopher Isherwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

It is only in the last sentence that Christopher hints at the basic hostility between Caskey and himself; the clash of their wills. The standing argument over Caskey’s midnight record playing was simply one expression of this. Caskey’s and Christopher’s wills had always clashed (see here) but the clash was now becoming much more destructive. Now that they had settled into a relatively permanent home, they had no prospect of change or travel to divert them, no move to New York or trip around South America. Neither of them could say to himself, “I’ll put up with this, because it won’t be for long.” Now they had to face the question, “What kind of a life are we going to have together—for the next five, ten, twenty years?”

As far as Christopher was concerned, the answer was, “I want to have a comfortable, predictable, fairly quiet daily life, in which my mind will be as free from anxiety as possible and I shall be able to work. I want sex, of course, with Caskey but I won’t be unreasonably jealous if he runs around with other people—especially if he does it elsewhere, because then I’ll be able to bring my own boys back here and screw them comfortably at home. I don’t care much for parties but I’m prepared to give them from time to time, especially if Caskey makes all the arrangements and does all the cooking and we don’t have to stay up too late. Oh sure, I’ll help with the dishwashing if necessary. As for Caskey himself, I want him to be happy and busy (at something, never mind what) and to go to bed and wake up at the same time I do.”

Caskey didn’t see things in this way, at all. He didn’t want his life to be predictable. He wanted surprises, unexpected guests, parties which snowballed into roaring crowds, out-of-town trips taken on the spur of the moment. He would tidy the house one day and drunkenly wreck it the next. He was ready to work for hours on any project which interested him, but he hated the concept of work for work’s sake and he couldn’t understand Christopher’s compulsive need to be busy. He may well have begun to feel, already, that by coming back to live with Christopher in California he had walked into a trap.

Christopher’s reasonableness, the justice of his case, the moderation of his demands upon Caskey were a bit too convincing—and he knew it. Relations between two human beings who are supposed to love each other—and perhaps actually do, from time to time—cannot be regulated by a code of rules. The truth is that Christopher was no more reasonable than Caskey; he merely had a knack of maneuvering himself into positions in which he was, technically, “in the right”—whereupon Caskey, with his passive obstinacy, would not only accept the counterposition of being “in the wrong” but would proceed to make the wrong as wrong as he possibly could. He always behaved worst when there was no conceivable excuse for his behavior.

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