A Disciple's Journal: In the Company of Swami Ashokananda

by Sister Gargi

April 1, 1954

  Swami: Devotion! Nothing can be accomplished without devotion. No real work can be done; there is no motive power without devotion.

  Me: But devotion seems to be something spontaneous, not something one can acquire.

  Swami: No, one can acquire it—through japa, through thinking of God. Of course, one must have the desire for devotion; one’s intention must be to make devotion grow. A priest can go through all sorts of worship and ritual, but nothing will grow within him if he does not desire devotion to Christ. Some earnestly do their work for the sake of Christ, and then devotion grows in their hearts.

  April 4, 1954

  Me: Yesterday morning I woke up dreaming about the Ranch at Los Gatos. I woke up crying and I cried for a long time. It is not that I want to go there now—I don’t. I was thinking about the way it was, something about the way of life there. The thought of it was just overwhelming.

  (Swami smiled and nodded as though he had known this; I was so emotional about it, he must have sensed it.)

  Swami: That is what the mind does. It picks out the good things from the past—the highlights.

  Me: Yes, I tried to think that what I liked so much about it was really God Himself, and the thing to do is to find Him.

  Swami: Yes.

  Me: It was frightening. I thought that when I die, I will be thinking only about the Ranch and wanting that.

  Swami (smiling): Then in your next life you will be born as a gopher in Los Gatos.

  Me (continuing my thought): I was also afraid that it might take thousands of lives before those same happy circumstances could be duplicated. (I meant at the Ranch, but Swami understood me to mean the circumstances of my spiritual life—which was, of course, more to the point.)

  Swami: You are absolutely right. It is said that it takes eight million lives before a person is ready to give up the world for God. Of course, it is a little different when a Divine Incarnation comes. If you get in the stream, it will sweep you on—providing you stay in it.

  Be extremely cautious. Don’t allow your mind to slip back. People cover the world with glamour. The glamour was all in your eyes. Actually there was a lot wrong with it; of course, there was good too or you wouldn’t be thinking of it.

  April 5, 1954

  Swami (looking up from his book at me): Be strong. Don’t wobble! Be strong—there is no substitute for strength.

  July 16, 1954

  Kathleen was in Swami’s office. I went by, not intending to stop. Swami called me.

  Swami: Hello! What is the matter? You seem subdued.

  Me: I feel subdued.

  Swami: Is something the matter?

  Me: Internally, not externally.

  Swami: What is it?

  Me (with hesitation): Well, I feel that I am just skipping around on the surface. I feel I should go deep, but I don’t know how.

  Swami (kindly): That is a very good thought to have. Just by having it, you will go deeper. Please sit down.

  (Others appeared in the doorway and the conversation became general.)

  July 28, 1954

  Swami asked me why I had returned so soon from Los Gatos. I had gone Monday and come back Tuesday. I told him. He spoke about living a spiritual life.

  Me: I do not do all I should.

  Swami: Why don’t you?

  Me: I don’t know. I guess I haven’t the willpower.

  Swami: Develop willpower. Do you think it just falls from the sky?

  Me: One has to have it in the first place in order to develop it.

  Swami: You have enough to start with—build it up. (After a few minutes) To find happiness in God is a good sign. Sri Ramakrishna is like a flaming fire, a huge forest fire. Everything will burn in its path. You think you are too wet to catch fire?

  Me: Yes.

  Swami: No. You cannot be too wet. Everything will catch fire from that flame.

  Me: Is it inevitable?

  Swami: Yes, it is inevitable as long as you stay with him. Swamiji said that Sri Ramakrishna lifted not only this plane but the other lokas [spheres of existence]. Think of the power he had! Swamiji was the one who understood him. If he said that about him, it is true. Approach him.

  Me: How can I know that I approach him?

  Swami: Through me.

  October 7, 1954

  I came into the office to talk with Swami at 7:00 p.m. after I had meditated.

  Swami: Please come in. Sit down. Is your meditation better?

  Me: For a while it was; now it is no more.

  Swami: If it was for a while, then it will be again.

  Me (on the verge of tears): I think there is no hope.

  Swami: Have you any alternative?

  Me: No.

  Swami: Then don’t talk that way. Others have found it; why shouldn’t you? Or are you going to be original and give up?

  Me: No.

  Swami: You know it is there.

  Me: I don’t know it is there.

  Swami (forcefully): Forget all that. You are told to know it. You are not supposed to do original research. (Smiling) Don’t give up in midstream. You will be all right and (very sweetly) you are not alone.

  6

  NEW DISCOVERIES

  When I look back on it, I realize that Swami had taken on a handful in me—as indeed he once said. He wanted me to write on command. I had written before; in fact, writing was what I had always wanted to do, but in my own way, at my own pace and for my own pleasure. I had no concept of working as though for a living—pounding out copy whether in the mood or not. Although I had made many resolves to work regularly and steadily, a persistent inertia had overcome my best intentions.

  Now I faced not only a bimonthly magazine deadline but also the growing demands of my book about Swami Vivekananda that I had begun work on the previous year. The idea of writing about the greatest man who, I was sure, had ever walked on this earth—a man whom I could not possibly understand—did not inspire me; it paralyzed me. I had, it is true, what I considered to be a divine mandate to write about him, but I must admit that I was not enraptured by the commission, nor did I feel competent to fulfill it.

  In the first two months of 1955, a deadline loomed for the next issue of The Voice of India, which we managed to meet at midnight on February 28. No sooner had we finished one typed copy and a carbon, and bound them separately in heavy, colored paper with contrasting tape for a spine, than Swami said, “Now, tomorrow, start work on the next issue.” Exhausted, we did not obey to the letter.

  March 2, 1955

  Swami: Are you starting to work on the next magazine?

  Me: No.

  Swami: Get started. A good subject for you to write on would be “Is Man Hopeless?”

  Me: Oh yes, I had thought of something like that. I was going to call it “Should Man Despair?”

  Swami: Very good. The Catholic Church takes the line that man on his own is hopeless.

  Me: Should I write the article from all different angles?

  Swami: Certainly, make it comprehensive. Agitate the brain cells. Bring out all those cells that you have stored away in the gray matter. God alone knows what you are saving them for.

  Me: I don’t think I have any.

  Swami: That is also a way of cheating. If someone comes to a man and asks for help and the man says, “I haven’t got anything,” what can anyone do? Learn to be a hack writer.

  As for the book, Swami Ashokananda felt that a book about Swamiji based on the new research material should first come out as a series of articles for Prabuddha Bharata (one of the Order’s English-language journals).

  As far as I was concerned that was fine, but I could not get started. Days, if not weeks, went by; in the end, after refusing to listen to my protestations of inability, Swami had to dictate the first paragraph to me. “Put it in your own
words,” he said. After that I was on my own, but the first dam had been breached and the water started flowing—in fits and starts. I came up against many dams after that first blockade. “Push on!” Swami would say. “Write without fussing about style. Later you can go back and polish what you have done. Just write! You will find that the dam will break and things will flow.” And, invariably, it would happen like that.

  Sometimes, however, I embarked on some complicated theory about Swamiji or his mission and could not, no matter how laboriously I tried, make it work out. I could not write it. Then, after I had spent days of this frustrating effort, Swami would phone me.

  “What are you doing?” he would ask.

  “I am trying to write about . . . ” And I would tell him my idea.

  “Don’t get into that!” he would say forcibly. “You will end up in a snarl.”

  My relief would be great, and I would throw out all the complicated snarls I was already in and get back to the main track of the story.

  It was not only at such times that Swami would phone. Once, I decided to clean the kitchen stove, which from the time I had moved into the apartment badly needed a thorough scrubbing. I had probably hit a snag in the writing and the stove called out to me. I was deep in the cleaning process when the phone rang.

  “What are you doing?” Swami demanded.

  “I am cleaning the stove,” I replied, feeling very virtuous to be finally doing such a messy and much needed piece of work.

  He exploded. “What! Is that the way you write about Swamiji, by cleaning the stove?”

  It was months before he got over this. “Do you know how she spends her time?” he would say to a roomful of devotees. “She cleans her stove!”

  He would also phone when I was not cleaning the stove but reading the New Yorker (in its halcyon days) or a book that I thought was relevant to my research—or, very likely, just a book. I would be admonished and sent back to my desk.

  Sometimes he phoned when I had hit a large dam and was in despair. At those times he consoled me and encouraged me to go ahead.

  Throughout the writing of the entire first book, Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries, he kept his finger on every minute of it, and also on every word and comma. I would write several pages, perhaps ten or twelve, and show them to him. After he had read them, he would call me into his office. I would stand on his right, and he would go over the text sentence by sentence, pointing out my mistakes—anything from misplaced or omitted commas to errors of syntax, fact, or thought. In my days of “inspirational” writing, I had never paid much attention to things like commas. I was woefully ignorant, and those sessions with Swami were an education in the technique of writing. He would say with pride, “I am a good editor, isn’t it?” And I would assure him (he who had become famous as the editor of Prabuddha Bharata) that indeed he was.

  I also learned a great deal in this respect from Edna Zulch, one of the co-editors of The Voice of India. She told me patiently and with humor about such things as parallel constructions, the difference between relative and nonrelative clauses, and the unforgivable sin of dangling participles—all things that I never learned in high school but had somehow managed to get right, part of the time at least, by ear. In those days there were very few books (barring Fowler’s Modern English Usage) on the subject of literary style. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style wasn’t published in book form until 1957. Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage first came out in America in the 1960s. In the very early 1950s I used to comb the bookstores for books on how to write—to no avail. Later in the 1950s they began to appear and I pored over them with delight, eagerly learning something that I had earlier overlooked, or forgotten, or never knew.

  Swami Ashokananda, though, was my first teacher in the matter of writing. Always patient and always gentle, he never made me feel embarrassed by my mistakes. Sometimes he would simply return a marked-up manuscript to me. Except for an occasional large and baffling question mark in the left margin, his corrections were clear enough.

  Once, early on, as he was going over my work with me, he wanted to see some research material. “I haven’t got it with me,” I said. “Where is it?” he demanded. I had to tell him that I didn’t know, that perhaps it was at Jeanette’s apartment, where I had been working on the magazine. That confession incited a long and intense admonishment, one sentence of which burned itself into my mind: “You will never be able to do this work if you are not organized!” I remember the torture of sorting out after that the welter of research material that I had accumulated. I would thenceforth always bring to my sessions with him a file box full of the material pertinent to the matter at hand; it was not neat, but it was all there. Years later he once said with a sort of parental pride, “Marie Louise is very well organized,” and with a smile he added, “in her own way.”

  One by one, the serial articles for Prabuddha Bharata were written and sent off to India. This process was still going on in August when, to my surprise, Swami asked me to go to the Society’s retreat at Lake Tahoe in the summer or early fall of 1955. It would be the first of my many summers at the lake.

  I thought something was up because of the car. Swami suddenly asked me if my car was in good shape. He told me to have it looked at, going into detail as to what I should have checked. I did all this. The next day he asked if I had had it done. “Yes,” I said. “Did you have the radiator checked?” he asked. “No,” I said. (He hadn’t mentioned the radiator.) Swami sighed, “Marie Louise, you are becoming too dependent on me. I take care of you too much.”

  Something was up. I soon found out that I was to go to Lake Tahoe for a rest, and also to work—mainly to work. As Swami said, “It is not to be a pleasure trip. The altitude will clear your brain so that you can work better.”

  It was necessary for me to take someone with me, someone who could type as I wrote. Who? There seemed no one; then one day Ediben handed me a list of devotees. “Look through that,” she said, “and pick someone.” As I took the sheet of paper, I looked up into the rosy face of Virginia Varrentzoff, who was sitting in front of me. “How about that one?” I asked. Virginia beamed like the sun. Swami approved. “She has made a very good choice,” he told Ediben.

  Virginia and I were alone together in Ediben’s cabin at Tahoe for nine days. I worked on the Detroit section of “New Discoveries.” Virginia typed as I wrote. She also did the grocery shopping and cooking. The days were warm and still. We ate dinner on the porch and watched the shadow of night creep up the mountains across the lake.

  Swami arrived at his cabin on Friday, August 26. He came over to see us around five-thirty. He sat on the porch, looking tired. He talked to Virginia and me. Jo told me later that Miriam King had left the convent for parts unknown and that Swami was terribly worried and hurt.

  Meanwhile, Virginia felt that she should go back to San Francisco because Chela, her daughter, was unhappy at summer camp and wanted to come home. This caused Virginia much anguish. “Yes,” Swami told her, “you should go.” He no doubt knew that she felt sad, and so arranged to take us to Mount Rose [a mountainous area north of the lake] for a picnic on Saturday. Virginia was thrilled.

  That summer Swami became absorbed in reading the letters of Swami Vivekananda in the light of “New Discoveries.” He found many passages that he wanted me to insert in the manuscript, which meant tearing apart my painstakingly joined paragraphs in order to accommodate them. I must have been exhausted by then, having worked steadily for almost a year, both at the book and the magazine. Whenever I saw Swami approaching our cabin with volumes of The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda in his hands, I would run to take a Miltown (one of the first tranquilizers on the market) to quiet my nerves. Somehow he knew.

  “I am afraid to come here,” he said to Ediben in my presence and with a twinkle deep in his eyes. “Whenever Marie Louise sees me coming, she runs to take a Miltown.” I protested that it
was in order to clear my brain so that I could understand him better. But he did not accept that reason, which actually was a true one.

  The Prabuddha Bharata articles were published in 1955 in monthly issues from March through September. They were titled “New Discoveries Regarding Swami Vivekananda, by an American Devotee,” and they dealt with whatever I had found that had not been known before about Swamiji’s life and work in America from his arrival in Chicago in July of 1893 until he left Memphis, Tennessee, on January 22, 1894. The articles were well received in India. Swami Gambhirananda, then president of Advaita Ashrama, wanted to publish a book along the same lines that would cover Swamiji’s entire visit in America. Meanwhile, I had been gathering more new material, about his stay in Detroit, for instance. So I soon found myself writing a full book instead of monthly articles.

  I sometimes wonder if any other book was written and published in quite the same way as Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries. Generally, I think, a complete manuscript is received and accepted by the publishers before printing begins. It was not so in this case. As I wrote each chapter, we sent it to Advaita Ashrama in Calcutta and, as further writing was going on, we received page proofs.

  Swami had insisted on seeing page proofs, not galleys, because the abundant inclusion of newspaper articles made the composition of pages extremely tricky. With his editor’s eye and meticulous attention to detail, Swami demanded, for instance, that the headlines of the newspapers come on the same page as the body of the news article. The Calcutta compositors rarely, if ever, got this right, and Swami recomposed page after page. He was an expert at this, for his composition in 1930 of Romain Rolland’s book, Prophets of the New India, with its voluminous footnotes, had given him good practice.

  The New Discoveries copy was sometimes impossible to adjust. Often I would have to rewrite a paragraph or two, adding words or subtracting them, so that the usually extensive headlines would fall were they should. And, of course, this adjusting would affect the layout of the entire chapter. Nor would this be the end: the compositors in India did not always follow directions, and often a second batch of the same proofs would go back to Calcutta, again marked up, to be recomposed and sent back to San Francisco. This would give me more time to write the coming chapters, but eventually Advaita Ashrama caught up with me and at the end there was a rush.