Best-Kept Boy in the World (8 page)

“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.”