My Guru & His Disciple (18 page)

January 13. Yesterday, Swami gave a lecture on Vedanta to a Young Methodists' club at U.C.L.A. He was disgusted by the students' behavior. The girls sat on the boys' laps throughout.

Sarada has become a Song of Bernadette addict. Whenever anybody wants to see it, she goes along with them.

January 14. With Swami out land shopping for the new center. A realtor showed us a marvelous property high up in the hills above Brentwood, with a view over Santa Monica Bay and across the city to Mount Wilson and Baldy. But it would cost hundreds of thousands to develop. No road, even.

The idea of moving the Center away from Hollywood to the outskirts of the city had been in Swami's mind for some time. I don't think he regarded the matter as urgent, but he enjoyed land shopping just for its own sake. He had an eye for real estate, and he could become surprisingly businesslike when asking questions about prices and the terms of a mortgage.

February 18. Richard's parents are here—just back from visiting Rich at the San Diego Marine Base. He'll go overseas soon. He is the camp eccentric. Everybody knows and likes him.

Perhaps the only thing that would ever reconcile me entirely to this place would be having someone here I could talk to as I talk to Denny; someone who, at the same time, was convinced of the necessity for this way of life and absolutely determined to stick it out here.

February 28. Swami has been sick. Now he's recovered. He sits on the sofa and we forget him. We play, unmindful, like children, in the completely uninteresting certainty of their father's love. If we cut our fingers we'll remember and run to him at once. Our demand on him is total and quite merciless. We demand that he will be here, now, tomorrow, whenever we decide we want him.

During that spring, I again met the beautiful young man Denny had introduced me to in Santa Monica the previous August. I will call him Alfred, because I happen to find that name unromantic and asexual; beauty such as his demands a foil.

Alfred and I started seeing each other often, and soon I felt very much involved with him emotionally. This I called being in love with him, but it would have been truer to say that I identified him with my desire to escape from the Center; he embodied the joys of being on the Outside.

Alfred himself couldn't have been sweeter about this. Although not in love, he liked me and was ready for sex whenever I wanted it. Throughout the next year, he treated me with the consideration and understanding of a true friend. I sometimes treated him as one of the seven deadly sins, which might be overcome by overindulgence. In such moods, my attitude was: Let me go to bed with you so I can get tired of you.

April 13. Was horrid to Sudhira, because she'd allowed a friend of hers to read one of my stories. The rationalization for my behavior was that, a day or two ago, Swami said to someone in my presence: “Why do you read novels? All books that do not give the word of God are just a trash.” So I worked this up into a sulk, the usual kind—that I'm not “understood” here, that Swami hates Art, and that this is what keeps all my friends away from the Center, etc.

Actually—don't I know it all too well?—I'm merely sulking because I want to run off and play around Alfred. I worked off some spite at the committee meeting of the Vedanta Society by announcing that I'd resign from being president this year.

April 14. Swami, sitting on the steps outside the temple this morning, asked me so sweetly why I'd resigned from the committee. I put it that I dislike taking any official position here because I want to feel free to walk out at a moment's notice. Swami accepted this as though it were the whole truth—and, as usual, his love and utter lack of egotism melted me completely. I suppose that's what Brahmananda did to you; you felt he was more on your side than you were yourself.

April 17. My day of silence. Eight hours in the shrine. Boredom. Blankness. Storms of resentment—against Asit, against India, against the possibility of being given a Sanskrit name. Extraordinary how violently I react against this; yet I know that Swami won't ever insist on it, if he sees that I really mind.

(To me, “Christopher Isherwood” was much more than just my name; it was the code word for my identity as a writer, the formula for the essence of my artistic power. So, to force me to take another name would be an act of hostile magic. You would be tampering with my identity and reducing my power … Like all matter-of-fact explanations of a magical process, this sounds ridiculous, of course. Which is, no doubt, why I refused to accept it at that time and remained puzzled by the violence of my reaction, calling it “extraordinary.”)

“Decided” not to become a monk, and to tell Swami so tomorrow—I doubt if I shall—but to stay here, at any rate, till Brahmananda's next birthday. Where would I go after that? I don't know. Just “out.” Sex, of course. But it's much much more than that. I have to explore every corner of the cage before I can assure myself that it's as big as the universe.

April 18. Talked to Swami after breakfast and told him about yesterday. I forget already just exactly what he said. It was the way he said it that matters:

No, it didn't make any difference if I left this place; it would always be my home. God wasn't specially here. Acts aren't important in themselves. It's no good promising not to do things. “That's your Christian training,” said Swami, smiling, and he added, “Can you imagine me as a Christian monk? I would never have been a monk if I hadn't met Brahmananda.”

May 14. Sudhira goes down to the hospital every afternoon, to nurse a friend who has just had an operation. The other day, a nurse came into the room and whispered to Sudhira that they were in a fix; a woman had been brought in dying, and there was no bed for her—they'd wheeled her into one of the waiting rooms and screened it off, and now the staff was so shorthanded that there was no nurse to spare. Would Sudhira go and be with her so she wouldn't have to die alone? Of course, Sudhira was delighted. The woman took about twenty minutes to die. No chaplain appeared, so Sudhira repeated her mantram all the time. “And just before she died, she opened her eyes and gave me such a funny look; as though the whole thing was a huge joke between us two.”

June 7. First news coming in about the D-day invasion of France. I keep wondering if Heinz is alive and if he's fighting there; and what is happening to so many other friends, English and American, who may be part of it.

A letter from Vernon. He now definitely suggests that he shall come West and live with or near me and study with Swami—though he doesn't want to join up at the Center—not, at any rate, for the present.

(Vernon had gone back to New York at the end of 1941. We had met two or three times while I was working with the Quakers at Haverford, and had exchanged occasional letters since then.)

I went into the living room and Swami said, smiling, “You are worried about something, Chris.” I mentioned the invasion, and Vernon—but not Alfred. However, as always after talking to him, I began to feel calmer.

June 12. 11 a.m. Have just finished three hours in the shrine, had breakfast. My sit was uneventful, lots of japam, avoided thinking much about Alfred, or worrying, or feeling mad at anyone. I yawned a great deal, and the salt from the tears has dried under my eyes. A dull gray morning. Have just smoked a cigarette, which I didn't mean to.

2 p.m. Have done the worship. Found I'd forgotten most of the ritual, but muddled through somehow. It's very distasteful to me, at present.

I feel bored, sullen, resentful. Envious of Denny, who told me the other night in a bar, “I've decided to hold on to the things I can see.” Must I be the only one to follow this way of life? Well, that's where Vernon can help. If it works out.

Denny says he's sure I'll be out of here within six months.

3:30 p.m. Did half an hour in the shrine. Ate bread and honey, and peaches with sour cream. Outlook on life a little brighter, but still quite unconstructive. Swami is gay and excited, because they've found a big property on the Pacific Palisades which would do for the new Center. It costs $35,000; but this amount can probably be raised by selling off the outer lots to various members of the congregation who will want to build homes there.

5:15 p.m. Have spent another hour in the shrine. This much I have doped out: I would never leave the Center on Alfred's account.

10 p.m. Finished vespers. Ate a sardine supper. Put in a final fifteen minutes, to make up seven hours. I feel a kind of stolid forlorn satisfaction, nothing more. Terribly tired. I'm like a nursemaid who has been dragged around all day by a spoilt child, full of energy and whims and demands. The child is asleep at last, but he'll be awake at crack of dawn and raring to go. Oh God, I am so sick of him and his complaints and his damned love affair. He needs a sound whipping.

June 14. Got up at 4:15 and did three hours in the shrine. Merely in order to have it over with and be able to run away and play in Santa Monica.

Before breakfast, in the living room, Swami said, “Take away God, and what is left? Ashcans!”

June 15. At vespers, a sudden thought: a way of leaving this place without abandoning everything. Why couldn't Vernon and I live together somewhere in the neighborhood, not too much involved with the Center but keeping all the rules? I must have a stricter check on my life than Swami. I need someone like Vernon—someone who'd have a stake in my life; so that my failures would be his failures, too, and vice versa. This worked for a short time with Denny, in 1941; we really relied on each other. But Denny is now going along a different road. Vernon is the only person who really needs me, right now, and he's the only person I really need. I wonder if Swami would understand all this? He must. I'll make him, somehow.

We've just heard that the Pacific Palisades property is already sold.

Marcel Rodd, a local publisher, had started coming to see us, because he had agreed to publish our
Gita
translation.

June 20. Rodd is a pale little shrimp of a man, with great dark eyes full of boyish impudence. He's English, with Levantine blood. He and Swami meet, as it were, at a halfway house in the Middle East, bargaining and giggling Orientally, and understanding each other perfectly.

June 22. Woke yesterday morning with a scalding sore throat. Today I still have a temperature. It's much preferable to my mental fevers.

A long talk with Dr. K. He believes that everybody who tries to lead the religious life is sure to get sick; it's part of the process of renunciation, “dying to the world.” If you persist, you snap out of it and your health improves. He sat on the bed, smiling and holding my pulse, and I began to feel better immediately.

June 30. I got back from Santa Monica yesterday, after spending four days with Alfred.

After breakfast, I went into Swami's study and told him everything—all about my relations with Alfred. “Now that you have come to Ramakrishna, you will be taken care of,” he said. “I promise you that. Even if you eat mud, you will be all right.”

I also told him about my plans for Vernon. I said we would want to live by ourselves but it could be just around the corner from Ivar Avenue. Swami agreed to everything, but I can see that he wants to get Vernon into the family, right from the start. He said, “I don't want you to leave here, Chris. I want you to stay with me as long as I'm alive. I think you'd be all right, even if you left here. But I want you … I think you have the makings of a saint.”

I laughed. I was really staggered. “No,” said Swami, “I mean it. You have devotion. You have the driving power. And you are sincere. What else is there?”

July 8. Told Swami I feel so frustrated whenever there are any rules I have to follow. He said that there aren't any rules; I'm just to do what I feel I have to do. I said I feel bothered by pujas. He said, “Well then, don't come to them.”

He told me how tired he sometimes gets and how bad he feels when he seems to lose all control over people. The only way he can help them is by prayer, and sometimes it appears not to work. They go haywire—he calls it “hay-weird.” He recommends japam, and talking about God continually, to everybody, in whatever terms each one will accept. Actually, I do do this quite a lot, with nearly all my friends, and it's surprisingly easy and natural. You can express the basic ideas of Vedanta in terms of art, or science, or politics, or sex. In fact, one need never talk about anything else—though one does.

Denny, that sourest of all critics, refuses to be impressed when I tell him about Swami's tolerance and open-mindedness. According to him, Swami is bound to accept me on any terms, because I'm so useful to the Vedanta Society as a translator and editor. I get very angry when he talks like this, and I think it's utterly unjust to Swami. But the fact remains that he is much less lenient toward most of the others. Maybe he realizes what a lot of karmas I dragged into this place with me out of the past.

(Once, fishing for a compliment, I asked Swami why he so seldom scolded me. He answered, “I don't scold for the big faults.” He gave no sign of awareness that this statement had crushing implications. I was so taken aback by it that I didn't question him further, either then or at any later time. Was his answer based on a misunderstanding of my question? I shall never know, now.)

July 10. My day of silence. Asit and I had late breakfast together, after my first session in the shrine room. Yogini came in and asked me questions, which I answered with nods, head shakes, written sentences on a scribbling pad. As usual, this developed into a game. Asit said, “If you shek your haid so vylently, you will injoor it.” I wrote, “That's one thing
you
need never be afraid of,” and handed it to Yogini, who replied, “I take aspirin sometimes.” I record this conversation because it's typical of the nicer aspect of my life in the family.