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Authors: John Lehmann
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should collaborate on another travel book, and that it should be called Address Not Known , and be published by the Hogarth Press. They arrived one morning at the Hogarth offices in Mecklenburgh Square and signed the contract. At the same time Wystan agreed to let the Hogarth publish his next book of poems - this was part of the plot Christopher and I had hatched to make the Hogarth the main publishing house for all of us. I gave Wystan a cheque from my private funds, not large, but it solved the most urgent financial problems for him. But Address Not Known was never written; and when Wystan’s new book of poems was announced in Hogarth advance publicity some time later, T.S. Eliot wrote a polite letter to inform me that Faber had contractual rights to it. Over a good-tempered lunch he convinced me that he was right. In gentlemanly fashion Faber paid me back what I had advanced to Wystan, and that was the end of the grand plot. I felt a bit of a fool, but I think that Christopher had acted in ignorance of the true situation. I am not sure that the same could be said of Wystan, who sent me a remarkably irritating cable from New York saying that he was helpless to sort things out.
There was one other matter, entirely personal, in which I did what I could to extricate Christopher from an erotic tangle in which he had quite recklessly involved himself. During the months before their departure he was besieged by a large number of young men whose one idea was to have an affair with the celebrity who had written the Berlin stories. Christopher did nothing to discourage them, revelling in his success, and got himself in so deep with at least one of them that he more or less promised to take him to New York. How this was to be squared with ‘Vernon’ I never gathered, but he appealed to me - I knew and liked the young man - to help him get out of the mess. This uncomfortable task I took on, as best I could, and earned Christopher’s gratitude but no one else’s.
VIII
A fter many, and rather tearful, goodbyes as the boat-train left London, they sailed, on 19 January as planned, on the French liner the Champlain. They almost immediately ran into storms, and arrived in New York in a blizzard, and Christopher’s enthusiasm for the New World plummeted: what greeted them was so starkly different from the picture they had been building up all the time in their minds, in spite of the presence of their friends to welcome them. Christopher never took to New York, as he had hoped, but Wystan, in the first few months, had the transforming experience of meeting the young man, Chester Kallman, who was to remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. Wystan and Christopher took an apartment together on East 81st Street, but Christopher was already dreaming of California. At the beginning of May he and ‘Vernon’ set off for the Golden West in a long-distance bus, so that they could see as much of America as possible on the way. Just before he left, he sent me his first long letter:
As soon as I’m in Hollywood, I plan to write a piece for you about New York. I have quite a lot to say about it.
Oh God, what a city! The nervous breakdown expressed in terms of architecture! The skyscrapers 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. The height of the buildings produces visions similar to those experienced by Ransom in F. 6, which reminds me that F. 6 is being done, quite grandly, sometime in August. We have written a new ending, and, altogether, I hope it may be a real success.
This was not the first time, nor the last, that they wrote a new ending: they never seemed to get it to their liking, or their changing view of its intention. He went on:
I myself am in the most Goddamawful mess. I have
There was one other matter, entirely personal, in which I did what I could to extricate Christopher from an erotic tangle in which he had quite recklessly involved himself. During the months before their departure he was besieged by a large number of young men whose one idea was to have an affair with the celebrity who had written the Berlin stories. Christopher did nothing to discourage them, revelling in his success, and got himself in so deep with at least one of them that he more or less promised to take him to New York. How this was to be squared with ‘Vernon’ I never gathered, but he appealed to me - I knew and liked the young man - to help him get out of the mess. This uncomfortable task I took on, as best I could, and earned Christopher’s gratitude but no one else’s.
VIII
A fter many, and rather tearful, goodbyes as the boat-train left London, they sailed, on 19 January as planned, on the French liner the Champlain. They almost immediately ran into storms, and arrived in New York in a blizzard, and Christopher’s enthusiasm for the New World plummeted: what greeted them was so starkly different from the picture they had been building up all the time in their minds, in spite of the presence of their friends to welcome them. Christopher never took to New York, as he had hoped, but Wystan, in the first few months, had the transforming experience of meeting the young man, Chester Kallman, who was to remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. Wystan and Christopher took an apartment together on East 81st Street, but Christopher was already dreaming of California. At the beginning of May he and ‘Vernon’ set off for the Golden West in a long-distance bus, so that they could see as much of America as possible on the way. Just before he left, he sent me his first long letter:
As soon as I’m in Hollywood, I plan to write a piece for you about New York. I have quite a lot to say about it.
Oh God, what a city! The nervous breakdown expressed in terms of architecture! The skyscrapers 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. The height of the buildings produces visions similar to those experienced by Ransom in F. 6, which reminds me that F. 6 is being done, quite grandly, sometime in August. We have written a new ending, and, altogether, I hope it may be a real success.
This was not the first time, nor the last, that they wrote a new ending: they never seemed to get it to their liking, or their changing view of its intention. He went on:
I myself am in the most Goddamawful mess. I have
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