My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  (Speaking of George reminds me of something which happened several weeks ago. Web and I—we’re temporarily sharing the big bedroom because of visitors—were wakened in the dead of night by a mysterious thudding. I was sure that I knew what it was. It instantly brought back the memory of a Japanese air raid—my first—heard over Canton from far away across the river, in 1938. A raid on Los Angeles is considered just possible; we’ve had two or three false alarms already. I assured Web, who was excited but a trifle nervous, that this could only be a nuisance raid. A Japanese aircraft carrier must have sneaked up near to the coast in the shelter of a fog, and launched a few planes. Our chances of being hit were one in a billion … And then—we both realized that we were listening to George’s typewriter! He produced the peculiar thudding sounds by typing with it placed on the floor. What had fooled us was that he hadn’t chanted while he typed, as he nearly always does.)

  Today and all night until 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, we have a 24-hour vigil, taking it in turns to chant Ramakrishna’s name in the shrine, an hour at a stretch—because it is the full moon of Buddha’s birthday and because Swami thinks we are getting lazy.

  Have just done my stint in the shrine room, chanting “Jaya Sri Ramakrishna!”

  (Jaya or Jai means “hail,” “victory to,” or “glory to.” Sri, when used as a prefix to honor a deity or saint, means “revered” or “holy.” In a secular sense, it is the equivalent of “Mr.”)

  The first ten or fifteen minutes are the worst, because they are a conscious effort. Then, as Sudhira puts it, “the thing begins to say itself.” You find yourself changing gear from one inflection to another. “Jaya Sri Ramakrishna” becomes “Jaya Sri Ramakrishna,” which becomes “Jaya Sri Ramakrishna.” Sometimes you begin to rock back and forth, keeping time to the chant. Sometimes you go up and down the scale, almost singing it. Sometimes you get terrifically loud and start shouting it. Sudhira, who loves anything emotional, says it’s best in the middle of the night. Once she and Asit and another devotee got together and made such a noise they could be heard all over the neighborhood. The shrine room “feels” quite different when the chanting is going on—it’s like being at a jam session.

  I asked Swami: “If Vivekananda had already experienced the highest samadhi, why did he have any more doubts?” Swami explained that Ramakrishna wished him to have doubts. He deliberately “locked the door and kept the key,” in order that Vivekananda should return to ignorance. Vivekananda had to doubt, for our sake. Otherwise, we should say to ourselves: “It was very easy for him to believe, he was simply hypnotized by Ramakrishna’s personality. His belief proves nothing.” What’s so reassuring is that Vivekananda went on doubting so long before he became convinced.

  Amiya and I were letting off steam together over the horrors of American food—for example, mint jelly and mayonnaise on fruit salad. (I must admit, I rather overplay the role of fellow Britisher, to please Amiya.) Yogini is the worst offender, I said; her mixtures would shock the witches in Macbeth. Sarada came by, overheard us, and laughed.

  * * *

  At this point, my diary refers to a project which had been in my mind for a long while already—a novel describing the making of the film with Berthold Viertel in England, during 1933–34. All that existed of it so far was its title, Prater Violet, and three “quite promising” pages. My desire to get back to work on Prater Violet was related to a general anxiety about my future as a fiction writer. I had good reason to be anxious. In the four years since I arrived in the States, I had produced nothing but two New Yorker-type short stories.

  Swami was well aware that I had written novels and that they had scenes in them which some people considered shocking. He had no intention of reading the novels, but he was rather amused by the idea of their shockingness and proud of my celebrity. Somebody complained to Swami about the indecency of a scene in one of Aldous’s novels. Swami silenced him by asking gaily, “Is it warse than Shekspeare?” And there was an American writer who had visited Swami and later described him in print as “a great soul.” Swami had forgotten the writer’s name but I identified him as that supershocker, Henry Miller. (See The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.) I told Swami: “You certainly choose the dirtiest writers for your disciples!”

  Swami didn’t tell me not to write any more novels. He simply took it for granted that I would devote all my available time and my literary abilities to our Gita translation, articles for our magazine, and similar tasks. The fiction writer was thus being forced to go underground. But he was determined to survive, and maybe these restrictions were just what he needed to provoke him into becoming active again. He was now a subversive element, whose influence would grow steadily stronger and make itself felt before long.

  May 22. Right now, I’m going through an ebb-tide phase—one of those periods which have recurred throughout my life, during which I would, ordinarily, oversmoke, lounge around doing nothing, go too often to the movies, run after sex, read crime stories, drink too much, wallow in the newspapers, and feel depressed. I must watch myself or I shall be apt to grab some excuse for leaving the Center altogether. (If, for example, they were to raise the draft-age limit again, which seems possible.) The forestry camp now presents itself in a furtively attractive aspect, because it would permit a return to sexuality. I now think of sex in entirely promiscuous terms; I’ve no desire for any kind of relationship. I don’t know if this is a good sign, or not.

  Reading the life of Vivekananda, the part about his austerities, I ask myself: What were all those agonies and struggles for? There are times when I feel that I have absolutely no idea. But then I always think: Well, can you tell me what Churchill’s blood-toil-tears-and-sweat are for? I don’t know that, either; so the balance is restored. The spiritual life is, at worst, no more unreal than the political.

  I’m starting to make a selection of Vivekananda’s sayings, taken from his letters and lectures:

  If living by rule alone ensures excellence, if it be virtue strictly to follow the rules, say then who is a greater devotee, a holier saint, than a railway train?

  If you are really ready to take up the earth’s burden, take it up by all means—but do not let us hear your groans and curses, do not frighten us with your sufferings. The man who really takes up the burden blesses the world. It is the Saviour who should go on his way rejoicing—not the saved.

  The dualist thinks you cannot be moral unless you have a God with a rod in His hand, ready to punish you. Suppose a horse had to give us a lecture on morality, one of those very wretched cab horses who moves only with the whip. He begins to speak about human beings and says they must be very immoral. Why? “Because I know they are not whipped regularly.”

  I am glad I was born, glad I suffered so, glad I did make big blunders, glad to enter peace. Behind my work was ambition, behind my love was personality, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power. Now they are vanishing and I drift.

  I hate this world, this dream, this horrible nightmare, with its churches and chicaneries, its fair faces and false hearts, its howling righteousness on the surface and utter hollowness beneath, and, above all, its sanctified shop-keeping.

  Let the barks of puppies not frighten you—no, not even the thunderbolts of heaven—but stand up and work.

  May 24. Sister was very contrite this morning because she’d disagreed with Swami yesterday when he denounced wartime patriotism. “Well,” she sighed, “that’s just one more hump I’ll have to get over.”

  Swami should be the last person to blame anyone for being patriotic. At heart he’s still a flaming Hindu nationalist, and gets very heated when British policy is discussed. But I’m never really bothered by his inconsistencies. And, essentially, he’s so humble. I’m sure he refers every problem back to the shrine and Maharaj. I’m glad that he’s sometimes vain about his youthful appearance; that’s so much better than being “above” vanity and trying to impress everyone with your holiness. Swami’s great quality is that h
e never gets in the way of what he stands for; his figure never blocks out the light.

  May 28. A blue jay, with a particularly harsh note, has got terribly on Swami’s nerves. He throws stones at it, jumping into the air with a little hop and nearly overbalancing. Amiya and Sudhira like the bird, however, because it enrages Dhruva, whom they both dislike. Dhruva barks frantically at the jay, as it perches just out of his reach and screeches insults.

  (Dhruva was Sister’s beloved, ill-tempered old collie. He was named for one of the saints of ancient India. According to legend, Vishnu—God in the aspect of Preserver—rewarded Dhruva by taking him up to the sky and setting him there as the polestar.)

  * * *

  At the beginning of June, Swami left suddenly for the East, because Akhilananda, one of his brother swamis, had become seriously ill at the Vedanta Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Before leaving, Swami told me that I was to sleep in his bedroom while he was away. Since his room was in the other house, amidst those of the nuns, this was a seemingly strange decision. Perhaps Swami, who was somewhat literal-minded about sex, thought that I, as a homosexual, would be further from temptation’s reach there than while sharing Webster’s bedroom. No doubt, also, he foreknew the effect that being in his room would have on me. I was extraordinarily conscious of Swami’s presence there, almost as though I was sharing it with him. I wrote in my diary that I felt like apologizing to Swami every time I used the toilet, and that I hoped I should go on feeling that way as long as my stay lasted. I did.

  July 1. Who should saunter in this afternoon but Richard, with his hair cropped short. He wore a blue Navy denim shirt, blue-jean pants, and a seaman’s sweater. He was three weeks in the Merchant Marine, on Catalina Island, and then got himself discharged because they taught him nothing except cleaning toilets. Now he has a job as an usher at Warner’s Theater. He plans to stay there two or three months, till he can join the Marine Corps.

  As soon as we look at each other, we always begin to laugh, like two people who are bluffing at poker. Only, at the same time, I get the uneasy feeling that maybe Rich isn’t bluffing. Rich sometimes gives you a look which is disconcertingly mature, indulgent almost, as though he were a grownup playing with a child.

  July 7. Out for a turn around the block before vespers, I met Rich. He looked a real bum, dirty, unshaven, and slier than ever. He has quit his job at the theater and is going around mowing lawns. He refused supper because, as he said, he can’t eat here without going into the shrine room first, and he won’t go into the shrine room because he has “broken” with Ramakrishna. His scruples are part of his fascination.

  Swami returned on July 14, bringing with him Swami Vishwananda, the head of the Vedanta Center in Chicago.

  * * *

  Vishwananda is fat, jolly, very Indian. He nearly chokes with laughter at his own jokes, and talks Bengali with Swami and Asit. Everything delights him here, especially the food; in Chicago he can’t get proper curry. His Indianness makes Swami seem more Indian, too.

  Vishwananda is staying in our house, thus producing a new crisis of overcrowding, especially as he has to have the big bedroom all to himself; this fills me with jealous possessive jitters. However, these I must overcome once and for all, just as I would have had to overcome them in a forestry camp. Isn’t it perhaps because I’m not in camp that this problem arises at this particular time? Do we ever avoid anything?

  * * *

  July 16. I’ve just been talking to Swami. I feel such a deep relationship with him. “Love” is too possessive a word to describe it. It’s really absence of demand, lack of strain, entire reassurance. I can’t imagine being jealous when he seems to favor one person, because it’s so obvious that his attitude toward each one of us is special, and “to divide is not to take away.”

  He touched my cheek with his finger and giggled, because The New Republic had referred to me as a “prominent young writer.” I told him how free I’ve been from sexual thoughts and fantasies during the past weeks, and he said, “Yes, I saw that in your face yesterday, but don’t get too confident, they will come back.”

  Vishwananda came into “my” washroom this morning, spilled water on the floor, and left a brownish gob of spittle in the basin. This is just the sort of thing I’ve got to take, and like.

  Later. Vishwananda got hold of me and put me through a regular examination, making me show him the mudras we use in the ritual. Then I had to talk on the telephone to Joan, one of the M-G-M secretaries, who had called up out of the blue to gossip. When we were through, I rushed into the shrine room, prostrated, rushed out again, had lunch, slept till four, hurried down to the boulevard with Swami’s watch to be repaired and a letter to Willie Maugham about the exact translation of a verse in the Katha Upanishad from which he wants to take a title for his new novel—The Razor’s Edge or The Edge of the Razor—nearly lost Dhruva in the crowd, got home, sawed some wood, joined in a discussion as to whether or not Richard should forget about the Marine Corps and try to get classified as a conscientious objector, had tea, translated a verse of the Gita, ate too many peppermint drops, and am now late for vespers. This is what they call an escape from the world!

  July 19. This weekend has been stormy, unexpectedly so. We had a puja and there’s nothing like a good puja for stirring up lust. As we sat there in the shrine room, it came to me with the fullest force how much I should like to give up Vedanta, pacifism, everything. Yes, get into a uniform and be the same as everybody else. I really wouldn’t care what happened to me, I thought, provided I could spend a few more rousing Saturday nights.

  Suppose Swami’s just kidding himself? Suppose there’s no God, no afterlife? Well—suppose. Then death is best, at once. But if you don’t want to die? Could you be satisfied with a life of cautious, rationed sensuality? I don’t think you could. You’ve got to renounce or destroy yourself. So the minimum Buddhist position still stands—wrote he, taking another peppermint.

  There is no point even in writing this down, however. In a stormy sea there’s no point in doing anything but continuing to swim. Keep going through the motions—nothing more. This will pass.

  July 22. What I didn’t mention in my last entry was that much of my tension was concerned with a copy of the rules and regulations of the Belur Math, which has just arrived. Back at headquarters in Calcutta, they seem to be getting worried about the easygoing way the American centers are run. They want us to shape up and become strictly Hindu monastics.

  My God, I thought, when I heard this, what is this gang I’ve joined? Is it to be turbans unwinding uphill all the way, to the very end? Swami answered my fears and doubts by asking me to write a letter to the Math for him, explaining that their Indian rules couldn’t possibly apply to the American centers. “If they refuse to give way,” he said, “I shall leave the Order!” What a little rock of safety he is!

  (Belur Math did give way temporarily, but it continued to exert pressure to achieve its objectives, gently and with truly Oriental patience, throughout the years that followed.)

  July 23. We are in the midst of a heat wave. I spend all the meditation hours rattling through my japam, so as not to be bothered with it at any other time. At present, I have no feeling for the sacredness of the shrine. If you ask me what I want, I reply: Sex, followed by a long long sleep. If offered a painless drug which would kill me in my sleep, I would seriously consider taking it; and I’ve never played much with thoughts of suicide before.

  I inhabit a world in which people are scarcely real. Real are my sex fantasies and sex memories. Real are the devices I think up for not being woken prematurely by somebody’s alarm clock. Utterly utterly unreal are Ramakrishna, religion, the war with all its casualties and suffering, and the problems of other people. I long to get away from this place. And yet, if I do manage to wriggle out somehow, I know that, in two or three months, I’ll pine to get back in again.

  July 26. Today has been a relatively good day. I got up early, went into the shrine at six, and then cy
cled down to the printers’ before breakfast to take them the copy for the leaflet announcing Vishwananda’s lectures. This morning I roughed out another page of Prater Violet, did three verses of the Gita and my 2,500 beads.

  July 28. Salka Viertel brought Garbo up to lunch at the Center. The girls were all a-flutter and Garbo didn’t disappoint them. She played up to them outrageously, sighing how wonderful it must be to be a nun and implying that all her fame was dust and ashes in comparison. Then she flirted with Swami, telling him how dark and mysterious his Indian eyes were. Sarada, of course, is convinced that Garbo’s soul is halfway saved already. Swami says that now I am to bring him the Duke of Windsor, his other object of worldly admiration.

  (Swami was a regular moviegoer in those days, so his admiration for Garbo wasn’t to be wondered at. The Duke of Windsor was another matter. I could only suppose that Swami still pictured him as the young Prince of Wales, visiting India in the early nineteen-twenties. Since most Indians must have been expecting that the Prince would be just another embodiment of British imperial tyranny, his unassuming boyish charm must have come as a great surprise to them and been therefore all the more powerful and winning.)

  August 6. I must just write a few lines in recognition of this important date: six months at the Center, six months of technical celibacy. Last year, that achievement would have seemed positively supernatural. Now I see it as the very first step, merely: less than the first. It has no value except as a reassurance that nothing is impossible.

  Today, Swami Vishwananda started to teach us a chant: Ram, Ram, Ram, Jaya, Ram. It sounds so idiotic—just like the fake-Tibetan chant in The Ascent of F6. And it is a perfect example of the kind of thing I must learn to accept. If I’m too dainty-stomached to swallow a little Sanskrit, how can I possibly prove to my friends that there is something more to this place than mere quaintness?