My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  I think how they would laugh at Vishwananda, and at moments I really hate them all—everybody outside the Center—savagely: there they sit, sneering and yet doing nothing to find out what it’s all about. But I’m really hating myself—for not being strong enough to convince them.

  To live this synthesis of East and West is the most valuable kind of pioneer work I can imagine—never mind who approves or disapproves.

  Last night, Swami told me: “One thing I can promise you. You will never regret having come here. Never.”

  * * *

  On August 17, I began what I described to myself as “a few days’ rest from the Center.” I had rented a room in a house which was opposite the Viertels’ home in Santa Monica Canyon.

  This wasn’t by any means my first “rest.” On several occasions I had spent a few nights at Chris Wood’s house in Laguna Beach, or at the houses of other friends. I had also often been invited out to lunches and evening meals. Swami made no objection to any of this, as long as I wasn’t needed at the Center for a particular reason.

  He can’t have realized, of course, that Santa Monica was an area of special danger to me, because of the erotic magic of the nearby beach. On May 14, there is a reference in my diary to this magic and to the kind of pseudo-aesthetic lust it aroused in me:

  Down to Santa Monica to have lunch with the Viertels, then went on the beach with Garbo and Tommy Viertel. We walked along the shore, right to the pier. The sun was brilliant, with a strong wind—the palms waving all along the cliff, and the ocean dazzling with light and foam. The air was full of spray and falling light; it was beautiful beyond all words. The afternoon had an edge of extra-keen, almost intolerable sensation on all its sights and sounds and smells. Seeing a human body in the far distance, you wanted to seize it in your arms and devour it—not for itself, but as a palpable fragment of the whole scene, of the wildness of the wind and foam, of the entire unseizable mystery and delight of the moment. I glimpsed something, for an instant, of the reality behind sex. Something which we reach out toward, as we take the human body in our arms. It is what we really want, and it eludes us in the very act of possession.

  Garbo chattered away. She was nice. I liked her better than ever before. Later she drove me back, shooting all the stoplights. But the afternoon was more memorable than she was.

  August 18. Strange—I’ve been looking forward to this outing for several weeks, and now that I’m here I find I’m bored. This is chiefly because of the Viertels. I’d blandly assumed that they’d be delighted to see me, and that they’d devote all their time to keeping me amused. They are quite pleased to see me, but they’re all working hard and busy with their own problems.

  Thus frustrated, I decided to get in touch with a young writer I had recently met, Tennessee Williams. He had come out to California to work on a picture for M-G-M. A friend had given him my address and he appeared at the Center—by ill luck, in the middle of a meditation period. But, despite the embarrassment of our surroundings, we had managed to exchange the necessary psychological signals, which meant that we would meet again.

  I located Tennessee, after some search, at a very squalid rooming house called The Palisades, at the other end of town—sitting typing a film story in a yachting cap, amidst a litter of dirty coffee cups, crumpled bed linen, and old newspapers. He seemed not in the least surprised to see me. In fact, his manner was that of the meditative sage to whose humble cabin the world-weary wanderer finally returns. He took it, with discreetly concealed amusement, as the most natural thing in the world that I should be having myself a holiday from the monastery. We had supper together on the pier and I drank quite a lot of beer and talked sex the entire evening. Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can’t stay awake.

  Since the coastal area had been put under a wartime blackout, the park at the top of the cliffs had become a sex jungle at night, full of servicemen and their hunters. Tennessee was in his element there. I walked with him a little way into the thrilling darkness but didn’t join him in the hunt.

  During the next week, we were together often. We were quite charmed by each other and already intimate, like the old friends we were destined to become. Swimming with him, or taking long early rides alone up the coast on a bicycle, I was more than usually body-conscious and pleased with my vigor. My thirty-ninth birthday was only a few days ahead, but I didn’t care. I felt like a young man.

  One marvelous evening, Berthold read German poetry aloud to me, including mad Hölderlin, my favorite. We were both moved to tears. I realized that he was trying to re-create the role of mentor which he had played ten years earlier, while we were working on the film. In this role, he kept making indirect attacks on the monastic life. To these I didn’t react. I could never be angry with him again—for, now that he had become a character in Prater Violet, he was a privileged creature and, in a sense, my child. He didn’t know this yet.

  By this time, Denny had been discharged from the forestry camp because of some cardiac weakness. On the twenty-first, he came to visit me in Santa Monica with two friends. One of these friends was a young man of striking beauty. Describing the scene later, I used to say that my first glimpse of him had hit me “like a shot from an elephant gun” and made me “grunt” with desire. When Denny and I were alone, I accused him of having maliciously introduced me to this beautiful temptation in order to seduce me away from the Vedanta Center. This was meant as a joke. Nevertheless, I knew that the young man’s image had been stamped upon my mind and would reappear at inconvenient moments, in the shrine room and elsewhere. It would be all the more disturbing because I realized already that he himself wasn’t unattainable.

  That same evening, I went with Berthold to visit Bertolt Brecht and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel. I had met them for the first time two days before, with Hanns Eisler, the composer, and had immediately become aware that I was in the presence of a tribunal. My position, as a member of a religious sect, was about to be judged according to Marxist law. My judges were polite, but beneath their politeness was contempt. To them, “religion” meant ecclesiastical politics—politics of the capitalist front. But even if I had convinced them that Prabhavananda had nothing to do with vested interests of this sort, they would have remained hostile to him. Brecht said—I am not quoting his exact words—that a saint needs thousands of sinners to make his career possible; meaning that any attempt to lead a spiritual life is mere self-indulgent individualism. I sat silent, almost sorry that I couldn’t defend Prabhavananda and myself with an equally silly dogmatism.

  * * *

  What I have been describing is a succession of encounters, all in various ways subversive, which perhaps helped to produce the absurd little anticlimactic climax of August 24.

  That morning, as usual, I went down to swim. The beach was almost deserted. As soon as I was in the water above my waist, I took off my swimming trunks, as I often did, and slipped them around my neck. I loved to swim naked, although/because, while doing so, I always felt the excitement of a flirtation with Sex.

  And now a man appeared, walking along the tide line. As soon as he saw the trunks around my neck, he began to grin, with pleased amusement. He stripped off his own trunks and came up to me through the water. He handled my body. I made no resistance. We were both sexually aroused and both laughing. I laughed because this wordless encounter seemed odd and dreamlike; I had already realized that he was deaf and dumb. Finding myself on the verge of an orgasm, I stopped him. He didn’t seem disappointed or offended. He let go of me at once. Still laughing, he turned and waded away. It struck me that he was like an apparition which I myself had summoned; perhaps a minor and unalarming demon. Well might he laugh!

  I went back to my room in a state of incredulity. Was this tiny push all that had been needed to throw me off balance? I was partly horrified, partly amused, entirely bewildered. As I stood naked in the bathroom, a voice said to me: Did you thin
k it wouldn’t count, as long as you didn’t go all the way? That was the same thing as doing it, and you know it was. Well, go ahead—finish it off.

  I did so, with difficulty. The act gave me no pleasure. It seemed idiotic.

  My reaction was to return to the Vedanta Center as soon as possible, two days earlier than I’d planned.

  Ten

  August 31, 1943. My chief reason for opening this book today is my intense disinclination to write a single word. I feel just awful. Can I possibly stay on here?

  When I told Swami, vaguely, that I’d had trouble with sex, he smiled and patted my head. “It’s a hard life,” he said. “Just pray for strength, pray to become pure.” So there we are. I’ve got to become pure.

  The diary goes on to describe emotional upsets which were currently being suffered by other members of the family—aversion, insomnia, crying fits—and continues:

  One’s first reaction to all this is the world’s reaction: mustn’t there be something radically wrong with this place, if everybody is so hysterical? But that objection arises from the fallacy that the aim of religion is to make you happy in a worldly sense. It isn’t. The death of the ego was never supposed to be pleasant, and this misery may really mean that we are getting ahead with it. So let the squeezing process go on, as long as we can take it. September 1. I have a gnawing desire to go and see Denny and cry on his shoulder. He’s the only person I can discuss the situation with, quite frankly. But discussing it will only make it worse. What’s done is done. Oh, wretched little ego, are you mad? What do you hope for yourself from this self-torture?

  How many times must I repeat what Gerald used to tell me: “At the moment of action, no man is free”? What happened the other day could never have happened if I hadn’t been lounging and slacking for days before. The whole time I was in Santa Monica, I scarcely meditated once, or told my heads, or kept up any discipline at all.

  The act itself was nothing. I only mind about it because it spoilt a record and hurt my vanity. It was even a very good thing that it happened—or rather, it will have been a good thing if it jolts my complacency. It’s amazing how one blinds oneself. How, with closed eyes like a sleepwalker—or like someone who is pretending to sleepwalk—one edges nearer and nearer the table on which the candy lies.

  And, as always, within this defeat lies the possibility of an enormous victory. If I can resume my life here and carry on as if nothing had happened, then that’ll be much more reassuring than if I’d never slipped. Morale is the only thing that matters.

  At about this time, I wrote to my draft board notifying them that I would be willing to serve in the Army Medical Corps, supposing that the draft-age limit were to be raised again. A recent official ruling had guaranteed the conscientious objector’s right to choose the Medical Corps. Before this, he had had no right of choice and was liable to be given any duties which were technically non-combatant. Most C.O.’s, including myself, had regarded this alternative as unacceptable—it amounted to helping somebody else fire the gun which you refused to fire yourself. Therefore, we had had to refuse service with the Armed Forces altogether.

  Since I knew that the raising of the draft-age limit was now unlikely, my letter didn’t represent a serious attempt to get myself forcibly removed from the Vedanta Center. Writing it was merely a move in a game which I was playing with myself, irresponsibly fiddling with the various triggers of change.

  September 15. Being with Denny unsettles me, and yet I need him more than ever before, because he’s the only person who can view my life as a whole, and therefore the only one who can give me intelligent advice. He isn’t shocked by the squalid bits of it and he isn’t repelled or mystified by Vedanta. He’s always getting in digs at Swami, whom he’s never forgiven, but he doesn’t suggest that I should leave the Center.

  His attitude was summed up the other day when he said, “Either make up your mind to be a monk or a dirty old man.” Sometimes I find this kind of brutality bracing, sometimes it just annoys me, because I know, and Denny knows, that he has no right to talk to me like this, when he isn’t faced with the same problem himself. If I were to leave the Center, he would be pleased in a way, because it would shock a lot of people he dislikes and because he knows I could only turn to him and depend on him more than ever—most likely, we’d start living together again. But he’d also be a bit dismayed, I’m sure, because, in a strange way, he relies on me to do his praying for him. Whatever happens, he can’t lose. And I, it seems, can’t win.

  Sometimes I feel that everything would be solved if I could get the right kind of person to join me here. Somebody who had the same problems as myself and spoke my language. But I know that this is only a fantasy created to take the place of the relationship I really ought to be cultivating—the relationship to the shrine and what it stands for. Everything else is a substitute and would end as all substitutes end.

  It’s as if I’d walked into a trap at last. After all my other impersonations, I have picked up yet another funny mask and stuck my nose into it—and now it won’t come off. Have I really got to spend the rest of my life with these people, or any particular group of people?

  How I long for the mere sensation of freedom again! I keep remembering that phrase from the Carmen song about smuggling and the mountains and freedom: “la chose enivrante,” the intoxicating thing. I don’t even mean sex—it’s far more trivial than that. Just to sit at the wheel of a car at a drive-in, eating pie with coffee, and know I can take off in any direction I want to …

  No! What utter nonsense I am writing! To say that I really want “freedom” is as untrue as to say I want the vision of God. I don’t know what I want. The very use of the word “I” immediately turns any such statement into a silly noise. Do I want to die? My goodness, no—for what? Do I want to live? My goodness, no—for what? I would like to lose consciousness for ever and ever, I think. But to believe in total extinction seems like sentimental optimism.

  How delightful religion used to be—in the days when I wasn’t doing anything particular about it! What delicious emotions, what pleasantly sentimental yearnings! Now it’s just a stupid boring misery. I seem to get worse and worse. I know that I am ten times more disagreeable than I have ever been before in my life. Oh, of course, I know the answer to that one. Swami says it’s like cleaning out an inkwell which is screwed to the table: you keep pouring in water and nothing comes out but dirty old ink—at least, not for a long long time.

  Later: Sudhira just came in, to give me a nightcap glass of lemon and rum for my cold. Her face, with its slap-happy masochistic smile, looked moist, perhaps from crying. “Aren’t you terribly lonely here?” I asked. “Yes, terribly.” “So am I.”

  While complaining like this, I was carrying out my monastic duties with a fair show of diligence—running errands, correcting the proofs of our magazine, and performing the ritual worship quite often. Then, on September 20, I went to lunch with the Viertels in Santa Monica and had another sex encounter on the beach. This time, it was neither absurd nor unreal; I simply met an attractive young man who wanted exactly what I did.

  The very next day, I got a telegram from a dear friend and sex partner who was coming to California on leave before being sent overseas with the Army. He was paying a goodbye visit to his family, who lived in a neighboring city. He wanted to say goodbye to me, too, and I realized that he expected our goodbyes to be said in bed. Was I going to refuse him—knowing that we might never see each other again? Of course not.

  I had to ask Swami if I could skip the evening class. This made me feel guilty. I sat with him for a few minutes, because I didn’t want to seem eager to rush off. Suddenly he turned to me and said, “You know, Chris—even if one gives up the spiritual life altogether for a while, he will come back to Ramakrishna before he dies. We know that for a fact. We have witnessed it.”

  * * *

  Maybe because he thought I needed a change of scene, Swami arranged for me to visit the three other Vedanta centers
on the West Coast. The official reason for my trip was that I should represent him at the dedication of a house in Portland, Oregon, to which the local Vedanta Center had just been transferred.

  I left Los Angeles on September 30. My first stop was at the San Francisco Center, a Victorian/Hindu-style building, picturesquely domed and fretworked, which had survived the 1906 earthquake. This was an all-male household, ruled over by a handsome, masterful swami, Ashokananda. There was no pampering of the monks with the domestic comforts we took for granted in Hollywood. I found the atmosphere frugal and depressing, and wrote to Sudhira: “I never realized before how absolutely necessary women are. This place smells of renunciation, fog, and salad.” The city itself, which I had last seen in peacetime, depressed me even more than the Center, for it was full of servicemen, waiting in crammed noisy joyless bars to be shipped out to their ominous future in the Pacific war.

  The Portland Center didn’t lack women, but most of them were elderly and seemed exhausted by the energy of their very young swami, Devatmananda. His motto, taken from Vivekananda, was “Face the brute!”—which meant that he tried to do everything himself. Standing on a stepladder, he handled the wire ends which awaited connection to a chandelier, as he talked enthusiastically about the future work of the Center and winced without complaint at frequent electric shocks.

  The puja which accompanied the dedication of the Center lasted for three days. My only relief from it was the time I spent with my former brother monastic, Richard. He was present because Portland was his hometown, but he was now about to leave it and join the Marines. Meanwhile, he dodged all Devatmananda’s attempts to make him work and threw a heavy bread knife around in the garden, saying that he was preparing himself for “Jap hunting.” One afternoon, during a party for devotees, he and I sneaked off to see a thriller called The Leopard Man, instead of handing round plates of sandwiches.