The La Verne Seminar began on July 7. It had been organized—to misuse a verb—by the Friends Service Committee. The AFSC had, to be quite frank, given a display of incompetence which, if I didn’t know the facts, I shouldn’t believe possible. Their job was to choose, from a number of applicants, twenty-six men and women, and to assemble them in Southern California. The cost of this—including telephone calls, telegrams and travelling expenses for the AFSC executives—was seven hundred dollars. The railroad fares of the seminar members and the costs of the seminar itself were over and above this figure.
La Verne is a little town in the citrus belt, east of Los Angeles, between the San Gabriel Mountains and the ocean. It lies deep in the orange groves and is sleepy with heat all summer. Midday out of doors is almost unbearable. The population is largely Mexican. The railroad runs through the town, and there are four packing plants for shipping off the oranges, lemons and grapefruit. Toward evening, you can see the peak of Old Baldy, rising ten thousand feet above the valley, through the heat haze.
La Verne has a college, founded by the Dunkards.94 We had rented their girls’ dormitory to hold the seminar in. It was a dirty, old-fashioned building, badly supplied with showers and toilets; but it had a largish basement room which could be used for group meditation and a lounge-hall which would do for our discussions. Somebody tried to add significance to our choice of a site by pointing out that La Verne might well have been named for La Verna, Italy, where St. Francis received the stigmata. I doubt if this theory is correct.
The seminar can be considered roughly as a conference between the Gerald Heard group and the Friends Service Committee group; its subject—the relative merits of the two ways of life, “active” and “contemplative.” The rest of the seminar attenders were either undecided semineutrals who wanted a lead, or high-powered individualists who had come, albeit with the best intentions, to impose themselves, their problems and their message on the rest of us.
Gerald’s group consisted of the Hunters, Eugene Exman, Lucille Nixon, Felix Greene, Denny and myself. I have already said a good deal about Allan [Hunter]. He was a lean sunburnt man with thin fair hair and a gaunt, deeply lined boyish face. He was vague to the point of idiocy sometimes, hardly ever finishing a sentence and changing the subject twice a minute. Christ was his personal leader—as real to him as Roosevelt. On this point, he and Gerald didn’t see eye to eye; and Gerald had to be very tactful to avoid hurting Allan’s feelings. Allan was a fearless pacifist and champion of racial minorities, and he often shocked his parishioners to the edge of revolt; but he was personally very popular with them, because he worked so hard and was so friendly and helpful. His home stood wide open to the world like a club room. He looked terribly tired, but I think he was a very happy man—loving his work, and dearly loving Elizabeth and his daughter and son. Denny found his boyish gaiety irritating, but it wasn’t facile. Nature delighted him. He was a passionate naturalist. On a country walk, he seemed to see, hear, smell and experience ten times as much as the ordinary person: he was perpetually exclaiming at the beauty of some birdcall, flower or insect.
When Gerald held forth, Allan listened rapt and awestruck; at such moments, he looked about ten years old. Allan’s utter humility before Gerald’s knowledge was balanced by Gerald’s admiration for Allan’s innocence. (Gerald was fond of saying to me that we were like people who had been crippled: we could never hope to use our own mutilated limbs again; the best we could achieve in this life would be a fairly good technique with artificial legs, arms and hands.) Allan could never have enough of Gerald’s talk. “A little more on that, Gerald, please—” he would say, as though asking for a second helping. His humility extended to everybody: it was genuine but tiresome and could land one in most embarrassing situations. Each of us had to be the expert on something. If you had spent a day off the boat at Yokohama, for example, Allan was apt to trick you into addressing a large meeting on the foreign policy of Japan.
Elizabeth Hunter, at first sight, might have seemed a common type of minister’s wife—a large, grey-haired, sweet-faced woman with a quiet voice. But her eyes, when you looked into them, were disconcertingly mature, wise and sad. She drew deep experience from her prayer life: Gerald thought she was a natural contemplative. She spoke little unless questioned and her answers were well considered. Spiritually, she was the most adult member of the group, Gerald not excepted.
Eugene Exman was Gerald’s publisher; the head of the religious department at Harper Brothers. He was a short, pale, fair-haired man whom one could easily imagine in a monk’s robe with tonsure and rosary. His serious plumpish white face with the rimless glasses might, superficially, have appeared merely goody-goody—he had something of Disney’s Three Little Pigs—but his eyes were mature and calmly alert, like Elizabeth’s. Also, there was a suggestion of worldly-wise humor; he was, as they say, nobody’s fool. In the course of his business life he had met and sized up plenty of cranks, lunatics and crooks; and his approval was worth having. He had always been devout. Devotion came easily to him, and this made him seem unctuous to those, like Denny, whose stomachs were sensitive. At La Verne, Eugene told us, he experienced, for the first time, “aridities” in his prayer. He was much distressed in consequence, but probably learnt a good deal.
Lucille Nixon had been a regular visitor to Arlene Terrace for some time. She was a schoolteacher in Palm Springs. She had the severe, clear-cut face of a nun, but her eyes were not serene, and her heavy muscular body showed much tension. She had spent some time in Germany, where she was psychoanalyzed. She seemed to have a strong will and great driving power: she was ruthless with herself and critical of others. However, she was marvellous with children. When she spoke of her pupils, you sensed her subtle intuition and extraordinary patience. She had probably made a mess of her adult relationships, and so children were, for her, a race apart: for them, her charity had no limits. She was successful in her profession, and had to keep refusing more important and responsible jobs, which would have interfered with her meditations. You felt the prayer faculty in her very strongly.
Felix Greene, my half-German cousin, was a very remarkable man, with a real genius for organization. The blue eyes in his tanned hawk-face blazed with rajasic power. Felix organized everything at La Verne—the sleeping accommodation, the work schedules, the menus, the activities of the hired cook—and he didn’t merely give orders, he pitched in and fixed things himself: the plumbing, the electric light, the furniture. There was nothing he wouldn’t tackle. He worked, as Gerald put it, with an energy “almost epileptic.” Felix had had an important post with the BBC in New York. Then he joined Henwar Rodakiewicz in their film unit, Film Associates. He was now working at the Philadelphia office of the Friends Service Committee. He was a born executive, but erratic, both in public and private life. Again and again, according to Gerald, he had acted emotionally, hysterically, and left his partners or lovers in the lurch. (Years before, there had been something between him and Peggy; and she was now sharply critical and suspicious of his motives—especially since his break with Film Associates, which, I gather, was unpleasant, though I don’t know the rights and wrongs of the story.) At that time, Felix was desperate to win Gerald’s favor, and Gerald, that old coquette, was cruel but slowly relenting. It was unofficially understood that this seminar was to be the probation period. If Felix made good, he would be admitted to Gerald’s circle and to Gerald’s center, if and when it materialized. He did, and he was.
Such, with Denny and myself, was the inner ring around Gerald. Not a well-made ring: there was already a dangerous flaw in it. But at least we would all have subscribed to what might be called Gerald’s minimum position: the postulation of prayer as the central, coordinating activity of human life. Gerald’s maximum position, which he seldom stated openly to any large group, included the complete monastic vow: poverty, chastity, anonymity. Allan, of course, wouldn’t have accepted the chastity: he believed firmly in marriage. Gerald made frequent, rather sha
rp-edged jokes about this. Eugene Exman was married, too—although, according to Gerald who knew all our secrets, he wasn’t any longer having relations with his wife. The rest of us—Lucille, Denny, Felix and myself—had all more or less made a mess of our sex lives, and would, on the whole, have been glad to be rid of them, if it could be managed without too much difficulty. As for the anonymity, Gerald, Allan and I were all writers and meant to remain so. I suppose Gerald had some ingenious rationalization to cover this, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Poverty was the least of our worries: none of us happened to want a big house with a swimming pool. In any case, we all had friends who had them and would shoulder the guilt of ownership, if we ever wished to swim.
Gerald approached the seminar with one quite clear objective: he wanted to see how far he could go along with the Society of Friends. In his books he had referred to the society as the one hope of spiritual regeneration within the Christian Church, but he had also criticized its complacency, its possessions, its puritanism, its lack of serious interest in the techniques of prayer, its general happy-go-lucky approach to the spiritual life. And Gerald was, of course, entirely opposed to the theory of social service as an end in itself. He would have agreed with Vivekananda in saying that social work is purely symbolic. It helps the doer, spiritually—but its material consequences cannot possibly be foreseen.
As for the Friends, they were interested in Gerald’s books and life, if somewhat suspicious of his “oriental” tendency. They certainly wanted to welcome him—at any rate into the outer fold. (And Gerald did, as a matter of fact, join the Wider Quaker Fellowship at this time.) But they all, even the most liberal minded of them, regarded Gerald’s monasticism with the liveliest alarm. The Society of Friends, as I was to discover later for myself, is an institution based firmly upon the family and marriage.
Harold Chance, the convener of the seminar, was a very good choice for the job. He officially represented the AFSC. He was small, stocky, muscular, alert, sparkling with American pep, intelligent, sincere. His teeth flashed, his eyeglasses were well polished; he kept his shoes shined and his hair combed. His boyishness had something of the nicer kind of scoutmaster: when you looked at him, you brightened. Nevertheless—and this made him interesting—beneath the brightness and bounce, he was a weary man. For years, he had crisscrossed the country, attending meetings, sitting on committees: he worked in the Peace Section of the Service Committee. And now, evidently, all this activity was beginning to seem stale and fruitless. Harold had come to La Verne in a bona fide mood of enquiry: he really wanted to know if Gerald had anything to offer which could help him. Harold had been raised in California as a boy, and he had spent much of his adolescence riding around the mountains on horseback; alone, sometimes, for weeks on end. He had evolved a kind of nature mysticism, he told us. In middle life, it seemed, this was reasserting itself.
Denver Lindley was a friend of Eugene Exman: he worked on Collier’s Magazine as an assistant editor, dealing chiefly with popular scientific subjects. Everybody liked him. He was my idea of the classic type of New Englander—tall, handsome, grave, slow-spoken, careful of his words, sedately humorous.
Harold Stone Hull was a minister, a friend of the Hunters. Like Allan, he was an active member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.95 He was a rather fussy little man; intellectually a bit underprivileged, but very witty on occasion; decent and sincere.
Rodney and his wife Marian Gale were schoolteachers. Rodney Gale had been a Christian Scientist and his approach to religion demanded carefully de-Christianized language. He was a big man with bad acne scars, very likeable. Marian was rather beautiful. Her face had repose. A younger version of Elizabeth Hunter.
Etta Mae Wallace was a journalist and poetaster from San Diego; a bit messy and arty-crafty, she varnished her fingernails, and used a good deal of makeup. Intense, and apt to sound off on the high notes, but seriously interested in the spiritual life. Denny and I once saw her, through an open window at night, dancing fantastically to the music of a phonograph, all alone. We were lucky to have only one such in our group, and a mild specimen at that.
Ted MacCrea had been a schoolmaster; now he was getting ready to become an Anglican priest. He must have been very attractive as a young man: he still had great physical charm. He was almost the only member of the group who believed primarily in the value of ritual. I went with him a couple of times to mass at a very “spiky” little church in the neighboring town of Ontario. I objected, I remember, because the priest gabbled through the words of the office, and Ted disagreed, saying that this was better and more sincere—if you put in too much “expression,” mass was apt to degenerate into a theatrical performance. His point of view was always interesting on such matters, and he made a real contribution to the seminar.
Then we had a bunch of college students—George Little, Margaret Calbeck, Bill Rahill, Harry Farash, Donald Booz and David White. George was from Maine—lean and angular. He had studied European history and wanted to do something about it: he would probably get into politics, later. Margaret was the student-secretary type, very bright, with a dutch bob. Bill had worked on Wall Street, and was slightly suspect, a trifle too diplomatic. He was a nice looking boy with wavy hair and a good figure; somewhat of a male flirt. Harry was a muscular little Jew from the Lower East Side of New York, who exercised with barbells, admired Huxley and went after girls like a stoat. He had worked as a navvy. He took a strictly intellectual-agnostic position, and was bothered by but rather proud of some symbolic visions he’d had while meditating. (Like myself, he’d had a glimpse of the “subtle body.”) Donald, the son of a rich father, was a big football player who had dabbled in student left-wing politics and was looking for a leader: he might easily end up as a fascist. David White was probably Jewish, rather moist lipped and very nearsighted, unexpectedly athletic and an expert hitchhiker. He was one of the contemplatives, with highly developed spiritual intelligence. He wrote a report on the seminar which was later distributed.
To come next to the big-shot individualists—Pat Lloyd, Cora Belle Hunter, Rachel Davis DuBois. Perhaps this grouping is a little unfair to Pat, because he was on his very best behavior during his stay at La Verne. But he had a big reputation as a conference buster and spiritual prima donna. While in the trenches, during the last war, he had had a vision of Christ which decided him to refuse to kill. He told his commanding officer, who was perplexed: he didn’t want to have Pat shot, as a deserter. Finally, they agreed that Pat should continue to take part in every attack, but with his rifle slung on his shoulder. Pat used actually to jump into the German trenches and shake hands with German soldiers. And there were many other stories of the success of his nonviolent tactics. He had once surprised a burglar and persuaded him to give up his gun. Allan Hunter had described all this in his recent book Secretly Armed.
Pat was still dark eyed and handsome, in his mincing way, despite his large middle-aged stomach. He moved with the assured, skipping freedom of an artless little girl. He sold books, giving all the proceeds to charity, and was a religious counselor at UCLA,96 advising the students on their problems. His greatest problem, he told us, was with sex. One of his recent cases was a homosexual who had become a chronic masturbator. Pat told the boy, “Imagine yourself doing it with your best friend.” This didn’t work. The boy masturbated more frantically than ever. “Tonight,” said Pat, “I want you to try something else. Try doing it with Jesus Christ.” The boy nearly fainted with horror: “Jesus Christ?!” “Yes,” Pat told him, “go ahead.” Next day, the boy came back and reported: “Last night, I did—what you said. I fell asleep in His arms.”
Pat was the kind of character who would send the average novelist into paroxysms of scorn and hate at this hypocritical, sublimated satyr, whose jaws dripped with honey. But if you were a little less queasy, and could dig down through layers of spiritual marshmallow, you would find someone very different—quite austere, genuinely kind, fearless and deeply understanding. Pat was probably o
ne of the very few Quakers who really had spiritual discernment coupled with absolutely disinterested goodness. He was still capable of an entirely unselfish heroic act.
Cora Belle Hunter was a healer. She had some method of releasing tensions by taking the weight off different parts of the body, which she called, “Freeing the struggling Christ within you.” She had an obscure, phony line of talk, and often, when she had made up her mind to speak, there was no stopping her under half an hour: but she obviously knew something, though she couldn’t impart it. She was curiously beautiful, with a beauty that seems characteristic of the southern states—powder-grey hair, a charming slim figure and wide, over-innocent grey eyes.
Rachel Davis DuBois was a Hicksite Quaker: a nice dowdy woman, with frizzy black hair and luscious black eyes which suggested Negro blood. Her specialty was organizing folk festivals, at which members of as many nationalities as possible would assist—each contributing something: a dance, a song, a fairy story, a bit of ritual. Rachel, acting as chairman, would combine all these into a new, synthetic ritual, appropriate to the occasion. You might find yourself beating a tom-tom, dancing a Highland Reel and singing a Buddhist psalm, simultaneously. This helped, no doubt, to produce surface results and moments of warmth resembling the friendliness of drunks. But, as she told about her experiences, very amusingly, one couldn’t help feeling how superficial it all was, and how silly. Rachel seemed to be attacking just those racial differences which are valuable and avoiding the actual areas of conflict altogether.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 31
