Apparently it was concern for Denny’s welfare that led Watson to insist, in 1940, at the start of the German bombing, that Denny leave London and return to the United States—a journey Denny made chaperoned by Cyril Connolly’s American wife, Jean. The latter couple never met again—Jean Connolly, a bountiful, biological sort, passed out and on in the aftermath of a rollicking soldier-sailor-marine-marijuana-saturated Denny-Jean cross-country high-jinks hegira.
Denny spent the war years in California, several of them as a prisoner in a camp for conscientious objectors; but it was early on in the California days that he met Christopher Isherwood, who was working in Hollywood as a film scenarist. Here, quoting from the previously mentioned Isherwood novel, which I looked up at the public library this morning, is how he describes Denny (or Paul, as he calls him): “When I first set eyes on Paul, as he entered the restaurant, I remember I noticed his 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. His drab black suit, narrow-chested and without shoulder padding, clean white shirt and plain black tie, 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.”
Seven years later, when I arrived to live at 33 rue du Bac, the address of a Left Bank apartment Peter Watson owned in Paris, the Denham Fouts I encountered there, though paler than his favorite ivory opium pipe, was not much changed from Herr Issyvoo’s California friend: he still looked vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which Fouts was permanently incarcerated.
How was it, though, that P. B. Jones found himself in Paris, a guest in the high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering rooms?
ONE MOMENT, PLEASE: I’M GOING downstairs to the showers. For the seventh day, Manhattan’s heat has hit ninety or higher.
Some of our establishment’s Christian satyrs shower so frequently and loiter so long they look like water-logged Kewpie dolls; but they are young and, by and large, well formed. However, the most obsessed of these hygienic sex fiends, and a relentless shuffle-shuffle hunter-haunter of the dormitory corridors as well, is an old guy nicknamed Gums. He limps, he’s blind in his left eye, a runny sore persists at the corner of his mouth, pock-marks pit his skin like some diabolic, pestilential tattoo. Just now he brushed his hand against my thigh, and I pretended not to notice; yet the touch created an irritating sensation, as though his fingers were splints of burning nettle.
ANSWERED PRAYERS HAD BEEN OUT several months when I received from Paris a terse note: “Dear Mr. Jones, Your stories are brilliant. So is Cecil Beaton’s portrait. Please join me here as my guest. Enclosed is a first-class passage aboard the Queen Elizabeth, sailing New York–LeHavre April 24. If you require a reference, ask Beaton: he is an old acquaintance. Sincerely, Denham Fouts.”
As I’ve said, I’d heard a lot about Mr. Fouts—enough to know it was not my literary style that had stimulated his daring missive but the photograph of me Beaton had taken for Boaty’s magazine and which I had used on the jacket of my book. Later, when I knew Denny, I understood what it was in that face that had so traumatized him he was ready to chance his invitation and underwrite it with a gift he could not afford—could not because he’d been deserted by a fed-to-the-teeth Peter Watson, was living in Watson’s Paris apartment on a day-to-day squatter’s-rights basis, and existing on scattered handouts from loyal friends and old, semi-blackmailed suitors. The photograph conveyed a notion of me altogether incorrect—a crystal lad, guileless, unsoiled, dewy, and sparkling as an April raindrop. Ho ho ho.
It never occurred to me not to go; nor did it occur to me to tell Alice Lee Langman I was going—she came home from the dentist to find I had packed and gone. I didn’t say good-bye to anybody, just left; I’m the type, and a type by no means rare, who might be your closest friend, a buddy you talked to every day, yet if one day you neglected to make contact, if you failed to telephone me, then that would be it, we’d never speak again, for I would never telephone you.
I’ve known lizard-bloods like that and never understood them, even though I was one myself, Just left, yes: sailed at midnight, my heartbeat as raucous as the clanging gongs, the hoarsely hollering smokestacks. I remember watching Manhattan’s midnight shine flicker and darken through shivering streamers of confetti—lights I was not to see again for twelve years. And I remember, as I swayed my way down to a tourist-class cabin (having exchanged the first-class passage and pocketed the difference), I remember slipping in a mass of champagne vomit and dislocating my neck. Pity I didn’t break it.
When I think of Paris, it seems to me as romantic as a flooded pissoir, as tempting as a strangled nude floating in the Seine. Memories of it clear and blue, like scenes emerging between a windshield wiper’s languid erasures; and I see myself leaping puddles, for it is always winter and raining, or I see myself seated alone skimming Time on the deserted terrace of the Deux Magots, for it is also always a Sunday afternoon in August. I see myself waking in unheated hotel rooms, warped rooms undulating in a Pernod hangover.
Across the city, across the bridges, walking down the lonesome vitrine-lined corridor that connects the two entrances of the Ritz hotel, waiting at the Ritz bar for a moneyed American face, cadging drinks there, then later at the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit and Brasserie Lipp, then sweating it out until daybreak in some whore-packed nigger-high grope joint blue with Gauloises bleu; and awake again in a tilted room swerving with corpse-eyed exuberance. Admittedly, my life was not that of a workaday native; but even the French can’t endure France.
Or rather, they worship their country but despise their countrymen—unable, as they are, to forgive each other’s shared sins: suspicion, stinginess, envy, general meanness. When one has come to loathe a place, it is difficult to recall ever feeling differently. Yet for a wisp of time I held another view. I saw Paris as Denny wanted me to see it, and as he wished he himself still saw it.
(Alice Lee Langman had several nieces, and once the eldest of them, a polite young country girl named Daisy, who had never left Tennessee, visited New York. I groaned when she appeared; it meant my having to move out of Miss Langman’s apartment temporarily; worse, I had to cart Daisy around the city, show her the Rockettes, the top of the Empire State Building, the Staten Island Ferry, feed her Nathan’s Coney Island hot dogs, baked beans at the Automat, all that junk.
Now I remember it with a salty nostalgia; she had a great time, Daisy did, and I had a better one, for it was as though I’d climbed inside her head and were watching and tasting everything from inside that virginal observatory. “Oh,” said Daisy, spooning a dish of pistachio ice cream at Rumpelmayer’s, “this is crackerjack”; and “Oh,” said Daisy, as we joined a Broadway crowd urging a suicide to hurl himself off the ledge of a window in the old Roxy, “oh, this really is crackerjack.”)
Me, I was Daisy in Paris. I spoke no French and never would have if it hadn’t been for Denny. He forced me to learn by refusing to speak anything else. Unless we were in bed; however, let me explain that, though he wanted us to share the same bed, his interest in me was romantic but not sexual; nor was he disposed toward anyone else; he said he hadn’t had his circle squared in two years, for opium and cocaine had castrated him. We often went to Champs-Élysées movies in the afternoon, and at some juncture he always, having begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men’s room and dosed himself with drugs; in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crusts of opium that had accumulated inside his pipe. But he was not a nodder; I never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled.
Perhaps, at night’s end, with approaching daylight edging the drawn bedroom curtains, Denny might lapse a bit and carom off into a curvaceous, opaque outburst. “Tell me, boy, have you ever heard of Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café? Sound familiar? You betcher balls. Even if you never heard of it and maybe think it’s some after-hours Harlem dump, even so, you know it by some name, and of course you know what it is and where it is. Once I spent a year meditating in a California monastery.
Under the super-supervision of His Holiness, the Right Reverend Mr. Gerald Heard. Looking for this … Meaningful Thing. This … God Thing. I did try. No man was ever more naked. Early to bed and early to rise, and prayer, prayer, no hooch, no smokes, I never even jacked off.
