My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  * * *

  On July 7, my monastic experiment with Denny was cut short by the opening of the La Verne Seminar. This seminar had been planned by some leading Pennsylvania Quakers in correspondence with Gerald. La Verne is about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. In those days, it was a very small town in the midst of orange and lemon groves, with a coeducational college founded by one of the Baptist sects. Since this would be vacation time, the Quakers had been able to rent the girls’ dormitory building to house the twenty-five men and women who were going to take part in the seminar.

  It had been agreed that there were to be three periods of group meditation and two periods of group discussion, daily. These were some of the problems scheduled to be discussed:

  To what extent must the beginner in the spiritual life be prepared to discipline himself? Can we make a distinction between the duties and privileges of two ways of life—that of the householder and that of the monk? Is the life of prayer a form of escapism, or is it, perhaps, the most direct form of action? Can the other major world religions, taken together with the findings of modern science, help us revise our cosmology? Granted that the present order of things is in a state of chaos due to the war, what could be the structure and sanctions of a new order of society? Can we produce an order in which man’s spiritual growth is fostered, not hindered? What have history and science to teach us about the nature and power of non-violence?

  Gerald, I knew, was coming to La Verne with one personal objective; he wanted to find out how far he could go in agreement with the Quakers. In his writings, he had referred to the Society of Friends as the most promising force for spiritual regeneration within the Christian Church. But he had described the Quaker way of meditation as happy-go-lucky. Quakers sit passively waiting for the Inner Light, he said, without bothering to study what the great mystics have taught about the technique of prayer. Gerald had also deplored the Quaker preoccupation with social-service projects. The Quaker social worker, he said, is unwilling to face the truth that his activity is chiefly symbolic; its material consequences for the people he is trying to help can’t possibly be foreseen and may sometimes be disastrous. The only person who stands to benefit spiritually from the project is the social worker himself—as long as he can remember that he isn’t really helping his fellow men but offering an act of worship to the God within them. The worker nearly always forgets this, Gerald added, because he becomes distracted by anxieties about the material success of his project.

  As for the Quakers themselves, many of them were broad-minded and genuinely humble. I think they were fascinated by Gerald’s personality and eager to understand his ideas, but they couldn’t help being suspicious of what they called his “Oriental” tendencies. And even the most liberal of them must have regarded his celibacy with some distaste. Quakerdom is based on the values of family life.

  * * *

  Until shortly before the seminar opened, I had been supposing that I should attend it on my own, since Denny would already have been called to his camp. But the call-up never came and now there was no reason why he shouldn’t join me. This he did unwillingly and with a bad grace, bringing his hostility to Gerald along with him. As soon as we arrived at La Verne, Denny began watching me for signs of disloyalty to himself—that is, of friendliness toward Gerald. So now I found myself in a peculiarly false position. I felt obliged to cooperate with Gerald publicly and also to join Denny in bitching him behind his back.

  Indeed, we bitched nearly everybody at the seminar. Our negative behavior expressed the discomfort we felt at being separated from our previous life together. We decided that life at La Verne was a kind of parody of it and that these professionally religious people were hypocrites, posers, windbags. From our decision, a convenient conclusion could be drawn: if they weren’t acting up to their professed principles, then we needn’t act up to ours.

  Actually, Gerald was at his brilliant best throughout the month we spent at La Verne. As unofficial chairman, he was tact itself in checking the overtalkative and encouraging the shy to speak. And he was masterly in his summings-up of rambling speeches which nobody else had been able to follow.

  * * *

  In my diary there is a day-to-day account of the seminar, with descriptions of all those who took part in it. I have already borrowed some of this material for the seminar scenes in Down There on a Visit, setting them in a different location and inventing a sex scandal to involve the Denny–Paul character. What remains I may publish elsewhere. It doesn’t belong to the main theme of this book.

  If the La Verne Seminar had been a sporting event—Contemplatives versus Actives—it could be said to have resulted in a draw, one all. By the time it was over, my cousin Felix Greene had decided to give up his executive job with the Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia and remain in California with Gerald. And I had decided to go to Philadelphia and work with the Quakers.

  This didn’t mean that I had changed sides, philosophically speaking. My motives were practical. Feeling convinced that the States would soon be at war and that I should then have to declare myself a conscientious objector before a draft board, I wanted to get involved with an organized pacifist group which could give me the moral support I would need. I couldn’t with honest conviction join any of them except the Quakers. Other such groups tended to be dominated by Christian fundamentalists who upheld the infallibility of the Bible and similar dogmas which I didn’t accept.

  I might, of course, have found employment with the Quakers of Los Angeles, some of whom I already knew. But it seemed to me less embarrassing to make my plunge into Quakerdom as a stranger among strangers, 2,394 miles distant from Gerald’s possibly reproachful gaze.

  * * *

  On August 21, having at last got his call, Denny left for the forestry camp at San Dimas, not far from La Verne, but up in the mountains. The next day, I flew East to visit Wystan and to be interviewed by Caroline Norment, who was about to open a hostel for refugees from Nazi Europe under the auspices of the Friends Service Committee. Caroline and I took to each other and it was agreed that I should report for work as one of her assistants, in the middle of October.

  * * *

  The hostel was at Haverford, just outside Philadelphia. A large, shabby mansion, built at the beginning of the century and once luxurious, was its headquarters. Between twenty-five and thirty refugees—men, women, and children, Jews and non-Jews—were living there or at the homes of neighboring Quakers. Many of them had professional backgrounds—as teachers, lawyers, economists, musicians—and could hope to get jobs sooner or later. When they did so, they would be replaced at the hostel by other refugees who were on a waiting list.

  Meanwhile, the function of the hostel was to prepare them for an independent existence in the United States. Some needed to rest and get their health back, some needed to learn more English. But their psychological preparation was a greater and subtler problem. Uprooted, disillusioned, and suspicious, they were being asked to have faith in and adapt themselves to an abstraction called the American Way of Life, which even their mentors couldn’t quite agree with each other in defining. No doubt, the indoctrination was sometimes less than tactful. No doubt, the indoctrinees were sometimes bossed into activities they didn’t see the point of. Nevertheless, while admitting the validity of Gerald’s objections to the Quaker practice of social service, I felt that we—Caroline and her assistants—were doing considerably more good than harm.

  My days were spent giving the refugees English lessons, going for walks with them, accompanying them to classes at Haverford College—to learn the American Way of Teaching—and to social gatherings in the neighborhood—to observe the American Way of Entertaining. I also, like everybody else at the hostel, lent a hand with the housecleaning and washed dozens and dozens of dishes.

  The thought that I was serving God within the refugees came to me often, not awe-inspiringly, but comically. It sustained me as a private joke does, so long as you don’t tell it to anyone else. The
essence of this joke was that most of these human temples of the God I was serving would have unhesitatingly described themselves as atheists.

  I am sure that the refugees had many jokes about me and the rest of the hostel staff. Almost without exception, they saw the Quakers as lovable but unworldly eccentrics and Quaker pacifism as mere craziness. From their point of view, my best asset was probably that I had known pre-Hitler Berlin. They kept coaxing me to talk about it. Doing so made me slip naturally into German, in which they would join me—thus breaking our often-broken hostel rule that English must be spoken whenever possible. Even those who spoke it fluently seemed unwilling to, unless compelled. Perhaps because the language reminded them of their predicament as aliens.

  What they didn’t realize was the extent to which I, too, was an alien, in Quakerdom. But, unlike them, I wanted to belong to it. Already I was using Quakerese in conversation with my fellow workers: “Caroline, I have a concern.” “Caroline, does thee want me to take thy letters to the mail?” I attended the Haverford Meeting House on Sundays and within a few weeks found myself standing up and speaking. Playacting? Yes, partly. But playacting about something that was entirely serious to me. There is no reason why you can’t equate the Quaker Inner Light with the Hindu Atman. I was really talking about Vedanta to them, but in their idiom, not mine. It was merely my self-consciousness which made this into a theatrical performance.

  * * *

  At the end of those long long workdays, I was usually eager to drop into bed and sleep. But, later on, when I had discovered a sexual playmate, I would take an occasional evening off with him in Philadelphia. This seemed to me just fun, well earned. I had no conscience pangs. I had never felt that Quakerdom demanded celibacy of me; they all approved of sex, even if it was only of the lawful kind. I made one little concession to respectability, however; I always removed my Friends Service Committee button from my jacket before we went into bars where we would get drunk and the steam bath where we sobered up again.

  * * *

  Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, regulations were issued which restricted the movements of “enemy aliens” to very small areas around their domicile—the area around our hostel contained no post office, no movie theater, no drugstore. Nearly all the refugees were still technically German or Austrian citizens and therefore subject to this restriction.

  They took it very quietly. This was what their chronic pessimism had been awaiting. In their voices there was a note, almost, of relief that the inevitable worst was no longer to be delayed. “It’s France, all over again,” they muttered. “Next will come the detention camps.”

  Caroline made a vigorous speech, assuring the refugees that the regulations couldn’t possibly be enforced because they were so absurd and unjust. “If we make such a mess of bureaucracy in this country, it’s because we’re not used to it.” (This I interpreted as a gentle reproof: “You Europeans got so used to your bureaucracy that you didn’t realize it would turn into a tyranny and destroy you.”) Then she was off on the warpath to the District Attorney’s office in Philadelphia. To my astonishment, the D.A. lifted all local restrictions on our hostel members immediately. Caroline took her victory as a matter of course, never having doubted that the American Way of Life would prevail. To me, this was an extraordinary demonstration of the Quakers’ power over the consciences of non-Quaker Philadelphians, even in wartime.

  * * *

  In the middle of May 1942, a young English Quaker lectured at the Meeting House. He was on his way back to England after working with the Friends’ ambulance unit in China. He had blond hair which was curly like a lamb’s fleece, and a charmingly silly, innocent laugh. He seemed to me to be an ideal non-violent hero. I got an instant crush on him—and was thus moved to volunteer for a second ambulance unit, which the Quakers were then organizing. I was turned down, however, because all volunteers had to be either doctors or trained automobile mechanics.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, as expected, the U.S. draft age had been raised. It now included those in my age bracket.

  June 17. Today I sent off form 47 to the draft board, applying for 4-E classification as a conscientious objector. When you write these things down for official consumption, they sound horribly priggish and false—because you are presenting yourself as a strictly logical, rational human being with principles, a philosophy of life, etc. Whereas I, personally, am much more like a horse which suddenly stops and says, “No. That’s going too far. From that pond I won’t drink.”

  I have reasons, of course, and a philosophy. I can explain them—quite lucidly, if necessary. But how dry and cold they would be without the personal factor behind them: Heinz is in the Nazi army. I would refuse to kill Heinz. Therefore, I have no right to kill anybody.

  Of course there are a dozen ways in which you can come to the pacifist decision. And I don’t doubt that there are many people who honestly arrive at it on general principles: they simply know that it is wrong for them to kill. But I have never been able to grasp any idea except through a person.

  June 30. Medical examination at the draft board. All these kids seem so utterly helpless, so unprotected. You feel, “Let me go, instead of them.” Their nervous little jokes. The old-timer who scares them with his army tales. The boy who’s afraid he’ll faint when they take his blood. (He didn’t.) The young Negro’s beautiful body, so dignified in its nakedness; nearly everybody else wore undershorts.

  I had to wait till last because, for me as a C.O., this wasn’t just a preliminary but the only examination I should get. They didn’t do much beyond establishing the fact that I was alive.

  * * *

  The Friends Service Committee had now decided that the hostel must be closed down—partly for financial reasons, partly because no more refugees were expected to be able to get over from Europe and because those who remained with us would nearly all be able to find jobs in the rapidly expanding wartime labor market.

  I myself left Haverford early in July, to return to California. Soon after my arrival there, I got a notice from my draft board that I had been classified 4-E. This meant that I could expect a call to the forestry camp within the next six weeks. Or so I imagined.

  * * *

  While I was away in Pennsylvania, Gerald Heard and Felix Greene had bought—with money from an anonymous donor—a ranch called Trabuco. It was sixty miles south of Los Angeles, in an almost empty stretch of country behind the coastal hills. Here Felix had caused to be built what they already called Trabuco College. Gerald said that it looked like a small Franciscan monastery in the Apennines. It was indeed dramatically picturesque, a complex of tile-roofed buildings with cloisters which commanded a vast airy view westward to the ocean. And its interior design was a model of monastic simplicity—built-in cabinets and tiled floors—requiring a minimum of dusting and sweeping.

  Felix had worked all through the winter, studying and revising the architect’s plans, pressuring contractors to get on with the job, dashing from place to place to snap up the last available supplies of lumber and metal fixtures before they were “frozen” by military authorities. He had also done a great deal of the construction with his own hands. “With an energy,” said Gerald, “that was almost epileptic.” Gerald’s adjective suggested not only unwilling admiration but an ironic admission of responsibility. He himself had unleashed Felix and his energy upon the original modest Focus project. And now Focus, the mini-retreat for four people, was swallowed up within Trabuco College, this—to Gerald—slightly embarrassing showplace, which could house fifty.

  Gerald reminded us frequently that Trabuco was to be a college in the sense of the Latin word collegium, “a community.” He also spoke of it as “a club for mystics,” non-sectarian, non-dogmatic, and as “a clearinghouse” for individual religious experiences and ideas. Those who visited it were to meet as colleagues, not as masters and disciples, not as spiritual superiors and inferiors.

  * * *

  More than two months passed an
d I had still heard nothing from the draft board. On September 25, I got a letter from one of the boys at the forestry camp, saying that they had been expecting me to arrive some days previously. Was I technically AWOL without knowing it? Alarmed, I telegraphed the director of the camp, asking what I should do. He wrote back that if I hadn’t got my induction notice I needn’t worry. He wasn’t allowed to admit me to the camp without it.

  Meanwhile, the Swami was urging me to apply to the draft board for reclassification as a theological student, 4-D. (One of the men at the Vedanta Center in San Francisco had already been classified 4-D, so a precedent had been established.) The Swami had a frankly admitted motive for keeping me out of the forestry camp. He wanted me to come and live as a monk at the Vedanta Center, as soon as he could make arrangements to accommodate men there. This might take several months. But he also had an occupation for me which I could begin work on immediately. He had just finished a rough translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and needed me to help him polish it.

  I told him I doubted very much that the board would agree to reclassify me when I was already as good as drafted. Why should they take the trouble to do the extra paperwork? The Swami giggled and said, “Try.” To my ears, there was a slightly uncanny quality in this giggle; it sounded as if he knew something about the situation which I didn’t. I sent off my application for 4-D.