My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  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.

  The proofs of the Gita arrived. In the afternoon, Marcel Rodd called, so Swami had to release me from my silence to discuss business. Rodd was much amused. I could see him thinking that religious people are all alike; God is forgotten as soon as there’s any money involved.

  July 11. Drove out with Swami, Sister, and Dr. M. for a property hunt on the Palos Verdes headland. It was so beautiful there that I felt more depressed than usual. The dreadful hungry boredom of Alfred’s absence. Without him, the oleanders and the sunlight and the shining ocean were in vain.

  At first, the house agent was very cagey; no, they had hardly anything, times were so uncertain, it would be too expensive, etc. etc. Then he took Dr. M. aside and murmured something, and Dr. M. shook his head decisively. At which the agent’s manner instantly changed. Well, come to think of it, there was one excellent lot, a real bargain, just what we were looking for … Later, Dr. M. explained to us what we’d already guessed—that the agent had thought Swami was a Negro. An East Indian, according to their standards, is altogether different, almost a white man. Sister was even more outraged than Swami at the idea of our having our Center in a restricted area.

  (I remember one more property hunt which isn’t recorded in my diary. Swami and I went to look at a site we had been told of, on a hill overlooking the Arroyo Seco, near Pasadena. The land had some empty, partially roofless buildings on it. These were obviously being used by teenagers for their orgies. Bottles were scattered about, with, here and there, a pair of torn panties or a used condom. The walls were covered with graffiti—the largest of them announcing in huge letters: JACK HAS SYPHILIS. Swami didn’t appear to notice any of these details specifically, but his face showed a certain uneasiness. After a few moments, he turned to me and said seriously, without the least trace of irony: “You know, Chris, I don’t think this place has a good atmosphere.”) After several postponements, Vernon arrived from New York on August 12. He spent the first week in one of the rooms at Brahmananda Cottage. Then he moved to a tiny apartment near the Center which I’d rented; I was planning to share it with him later.

  But now something quite unforeseen happened. A wealthy old man, who had been a disciple of Swami for some while already, made a gift to the Vedanta Society of a house he owned at Montecito, near Santa Barbara, together with enough money to pay its property taxes.

  August 28. Swami has decided that this shall be the new Center we’ve been looking for. For the present, Amiya is to be in charge there, and other members of the family will take it in turns to go up and stay. Swami will commute back and forth. After the war is over, the Society will move up there and extra buildings will be added.

  Swami has invited Vernon to live at Montecito. There’s a garden house he can have, which stands apart from the main house. Vernon seems pleased with the idea and wants to go as soon as possible. I don’t know what to think. I didn’t want him to plunge into the family so quickly—but then, I didn’t altogether realize how sold he is on Vedanta. And, after all, why hesitate? We have to try it.

  I’ll probably spend a lot of time at the Montecito house myself. We went on the 20th, to look at it. It’s very beautiful there. The house stands high up the mountain slope, on the edge of the national-forest land. You look over the bay with its islands; a much finer view than any around Santa Monica. It’s still quite wild country, with deer and coyotes and rattlesnakes and even some mountain lions. The other homes in this area are mostly large estates; you don’t feel the presence of neighbors. It’s not expanding like Los Angeles. The war seems hardly to have touched it.

  Vernon has exactly the right attitude toward the Center; sees the funny side of it, and yet realizes the necessity of the funny side, and the significance behind it. His being here seems to lighten up the whole place and every minute of the time. I no longer want to rush away to Santa Monica. And the Alfred situation has practically ceased to exist.

  Vernon’s popular with the family already. Swami says, “Who could help loving him?” Amiya coos over him. Sarada is romantic about his looks. He wrestles with Webster and teases Asit.

  The other day, Chris Wood came to visit us. After he left, Swami exclaimed, “What a good man!”

  This comment of Swami’s made a particularly strong impression on me, because I had grown so accustomed to the shrugs and head shakings of Gerald’s Christian friends over Chris’s open homosexuality. It wasn’t that they disliked Chris—though shy, he was always polite to them—but not one of them would have described him as “good.” How could he be good? He was immoral. When Swami called Chris “good,” the word had to be understood in relation to his statement: “Purity is telling the truth.” Chris was certainly “pure” and therefore “good” in this sense. He was remarkable for his frankness and truthfulness, about himself and about everybody else. You couldn’t imagine him pretending to feel or think anything that he didn’t. You might say that his sex life was a function of his truthfulness. It had to be open and a scandal.

  As happens in many long and intimate relationships, Gerald and Chris had become locked into opposite and complementary roles. In their case, these roles were absurdly symbolic; Gerald played the Saint and Chris the Sinner. The Saint prayed for the Sinner and the Sinner cooperated by continuing to sin. However, Chris was essentially a believer—or at least a would-be believer—not an unbeliever, as his role demanded. Even if he had wished to join the community of believers at Trabuco, he could only have done so by changing his role and becoming the Repentant Sinner. This was unthinkable. Chris could never have acted out such a lie against his nature. Besides, by changing roles, he would have upset the balance of his relationship with Gerald, whom he loved. The same thing would have happened, in a different way, if he had become Swami’s disciple.

  What Chris did do, at this time, was surprising enough, because it was a breach of his usual reticence about his deeper feelings. He wrote a review of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is a compilation by Mahendranath Gupta [“M.”] of conversations between Ramakrishna and his disciples and devotees. A new translation by Swami Nikhilananda, head of one of the two New
York Vedanta Centers, had been published in 1942.)

  Chris’s review begins:

  “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna? It’s awfully long. What’s it all about? It certainly weighs enough! And what a strange-looking man!” “It’s a fascinating piece of biography,” I answered, “quite extraordinarily honest. And as for its being long, the truth about anyone is never dull. Try it; I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.” And, I added to myself, maybe you’ll get something more than pleasure out of it … Which made me wonder what I, also an outsider, had got out of it. But, of course, there are really no outsiders. For, the more I think about Ramakrishna and his disciples, the more I am aware of a growing conviction that, sooner or later, by some route or other, this is the way we all must go.

  And it ends:

  And when at last, ceasing to reason, one stills one’s mind, there is something more. There steals over one a strange nostalgia, an almost-memory of something once known, long since forgotten. And one wonders, all too well aware of the answer, what has one in place of that which is lost? Vanity, illusion; just nothing.

  Chris had shown me this, as he sometimes showed me his stories, with a characteristic air of self-deprecation. I had persuaded him to let Swami see it, and Swami had at once insisted that it must be published in our magazine. This was probably why Chris had been invited to visit us at the Center, which he very rarely did.

  August 29. A stupefyingly hot day. I sat under the acacia, on the front lawn, correcting the magazine proofs. Vernon came out of the temple and told me that he’d had the best meditation of his whole life. It makes me so wonderfully happy, having him here.

  So now another attempt begins, to live this life the way it ought to be lived. I have Swami. I have Vernon. I have this place. I have some experience behind me and some acquired confidence. If I fail, I will have no alibi whatsoever.