Swami 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.
Madhabi is a tiny middle-aged woman, with a sort of pinched, childlike prettiness. She affects dirndl clothes and is “dainty” and terribly middle-class, bristling with prejudices, and addicted to “gracious living.” She used to be an actress. Her husband is an officer in the marines. We both realize, I think, that we have got to be careful with each other, so we’re very polite. Madhabi made a good start by admiring the way I’d decorated the shrine, the day she arrived. I helped her fix her room. If we don’t see too much of each other at first, it may be all right.
The other day, I was walking along the street, and several kids were firing at each other with toy pistols, capturing Sicily or Kiska.167 In the midst of all the yells and banging, one of the boys turned to me and said, in a very grown-up, slightly apologetic tone: “It’s a great game!”
Rich is in here this morning, sawing wood with Web. He has been around ever since Swami returned home, popping in and out, quite one of the family again. No one knows just what he plans to do.
Later.… Swami Vishwananda got hold of me and put me through a regular examination on the mudras we use in the worship; from these we went on to talk about my travels in China. I saw no escape, until Peggy created a diversion by coming out of the living room with Swami. She’d called to get a “dispensation” for her marriage with Bill, and of course she got it, and was let off with a caution not to do it again. Scarcely was I back from talking to Peggy, when Mrs. Herbold (one of Allan Hunter’s parishioners) drove up with a woman from some government office which sends out literature to foreign countries about U.S. culture. She had gotten Wystan to broadcast in New York, and she wanted me to write something about the Vedanta Society—to show how wonderfully the U.S. tolerates all religions. (When I told this at lunch, Yogini said, “I think it’s wonderful the way we tolerate the United States.”) Refused politely, loaning her my copy of On this Island,168 and prepared to go into the temple, but first I had to talk to Joan Keating, one of my Metro ex-secretaries, who called up out of the bluest blue to gossip. Rushed into the shrine room, prostrated, offered a flower, 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 which he wants to use as 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 Rich should forget about the Marine Corps and try to get classified as a C.O., 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. Join the navy. 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—don’t ask for anything—just go right on swimming. This will pass.
July 22. The storm is slowly blowing itself out, it seems.
What I didn’t mention in my last entry is that a good deal of my state of tension was concerned with India: Swami Vishwananda, and the arrival of a copy of the rules and regulations of the Belur Math. (The central monastery of the Ramakrishna Order, in Calcutta.) My God, I thought, what is this gang I am joining? Is it to be curry and turbans unwinding uphill all the way, to the very end?169 Swami was quite wonderful, because he answered my fears and doubts indirectly, telepathically almost, by asking me to write a letter to the Math for him, explaining that their rules could not possibly apply to western probationers. “If they refuse to change,” he said, “I shall leave the order!” What a little rock of safety he is!
Then George, in his rigid New England way, refused to sign the admission application, because he said he couldn’t agree to give up his money to the order.
Yesterday, at supper, Swami told us how his brother monks, for a joke, gave him a drink prepared from hemp. He was terribly sick, after it, and had psychic visions, followed by a violent reaction: for six months, he lost his faith altogether. I asked him, didn’t he consider leaving the monastery, during that time? “No!” he answered, “why should I do that? Because I had stopped believing in God, that did not mean that I believed in the world.”
The day before yesterday, Peggy and Bill Kiskadden got married. She’s bringing him to vespers; starting his training at once.
July 23. Just before vespers, I had a talk with Sudhira, who had announced she was going to leave this place permanently. Told her she’s the one I like best here, and that I’d regard her going away as an act of desertion. Sudhira replied that, if she stays here, she’ll become a mental case. Now that Madhabi is back, she can’t resist ganging up with her against Amiya—and, rather than do this, she’ll leave. However, when we were through talking, she told me: “You’ve succeeded in pricking my conscience, a little.” That was yesterday. This morning she says she’s not going.
I’m writing this before lunch—having gabbled through 500 of my daily 2,500 beads, while Vishwananda, like a curly-headed black elephant, puffingly offered flowers to the Lord. Sarada is sick, and yesterday and today he has done the worship. I went out of the temple early, to avoid being asked to clean up the shrine when he had finished.
I’m at what seems a new all-time low ebb. We are in the midst of a heat wave. I haven’t said a real prayer in weeks, or meditated in months. 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 and not the least reverence for Ramakrishna or anybody else. 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 memories. Real are the devices I think up for not being woken by Asit’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. This is the hottest day so far, with no letup in sight. But I don’t really mind, because today has been relatively a good day. I got up early, went into the shrine at six, and cycled down to the printers’ before breakfast, to take them the copy for the leaflet announcing Swami Vishwananda’s lectures. This morning I roughed out another page of my novelette, did three verses of the Gita, and my 2,500 beads.
There is an old man who is rather on my conscience. He is little, skinny, white haired, crooked and alert, and has a German accent. He says he’s a research chemist who took up Vedanta, renounced everything, invented a special diet, and went to India, where he stayed at several of the Ramakrishna monasteries. This much seems to be true, but Swami says he was a nuisance and got into a lot of trouble. However, he’s now living in a room without washing facilities and has to wait until 8 a.m. before he ca
n use the bathroom; so this morning he came here and used ours. He would like to live here and sleep on the floor; and we won’t let him, because he’d be in the way. So I feel guilty, like a rich, fat old friar.
On Saturday, I cycled down to Santa Monica and lunched with the Viertels. The air was so fresh after sticky Hollywood, and the Viertels’ political talk was refreshing, too—as a change. Hans was there, and Tommy, and a nice young Jewish boxer named Dick,170 and Stefan Brecht—Bertolt Brecht’s son. Stefan is a spotty boy with glasses, very sweet, gentle brown eyes and a small slim muscular body. He plans to return to Germany after Hitler and become a political journalist. He’s a deadly serious Marxist, studies chemistry at UCLA, and plays chess with Eduard [Steuermann], Salka’s brother. When introduced, he bows stiffly from the waist.
Everything in the household was just as usual. Berthold and Hans got into one of their heated arguments. It might easily have been 1939—except that Peter is in the Pacific war zone with the marines, and Tommy will shortly have to register for the draft. Salka came home around three o’clock, attended by collaborators, secretaries, etc. She is writing two stories at once—one about Iceland, for Garbo; the other about refugee domestic servants.
On the beach, I noticed a very handsome blond young man, lounging on the sand talking to some girls, in an attitude of such imperious elegance that it was downright funny. As I came up from the ocean after swimming, the girls were getting into a car and the boy was just rising to his feet. He braced one leg, brown and muscular, and stood up—and then I saw that the other leg hung useless, quite tiny, withered and crooked as a scythe. And now the boy’s face looked entirely different. It was nicer, kinder and more mature, and there were lines of pain around the mouth.
July 27. Sudhira often brings me candy from the market. We call it “medical supplies.” Today she left a whole box of it in my room, with a note, “I’m tired of being treated as an anticlimax.” However much or little this meant, it seemed to require some reaction: after all, we are declared allies. So we went for a walk on the hills, looking down over the reservoir full of strange confused gleams from the overcast sky, and over the city lying dully beneath moist hot thundery clouds. I told Sudhira that I don’t really like Indians as a race; Swami is an exception. Swami Vishwananda is sympathetic, but he’s a murderee like nearly all of them, and I don’t respect him.
July 28. Salka brought Garbo up to lunch at Ivar Avenue. The girls were all a-flutter, and Garbo didn’t disappoint them. She played up outrageously, sighing about how wonderful it must be to be a nun, and flirting with Swami, telling him about his dark, mysterious, oriental eyes. Sarada, of course, was convinced that Garbo’s soul is halfway saved already, and Swami says that now I have to bring him the Duke of Windsor—his other great object of admiration.
August 6. Terribly late for vespers, I must just write a few lines in recognition of this important date: six months at Ivar Avenue, 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 F6.171 And it is the perfect example of the kind of thing I’ve got to learn to take. If I am too dainty-stomached to swallow a little Sanskrit, how can I possibly prove to my friends that there is something more to Ivar Avenue than mere quaintness? I think how they would laugh at Vishwananda, and at moments I really hate them all—everybody outside this place—savagely: there they sit sneering and 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.”
Madhabi is back. Her sister in Riverside has been ill. When Madhabi went into the sickroom, she was wearing a prasad ring on her finger. (At pujas for Kali and Holy Mother, rings and ornaments are offered in the shrine and afterwards distributed among the girls as prasad—consecrated offerings.) Madhabi’s sister was scarcely conscious, the room was darkened and, anyhow, she knew nothing about the ring’s existence. But she asked at once, “May I have that ring you’re wearing?” Madhabi gave it to her. When the sister got better, she returned the ring, saying, “Goodness knows why I asked you for it, or how I knew you’d got it—but it seemed awfully important at the time.” She also told Madhabi how, one night while she was still very sick, a lady came in and sat by her bed. “I knew it wasn’t the nurse. Perhaps it was the superintendent. She seemed very important.” The remarkable thing about this story is that Madhabi’s sister violently disapproves of Hinduism and Hindu ritual, which she regards as superstitious nonsense; and Madhabi is sure that she knows nothing whatever about the custom and theory of prasad, or the nature of this particular ring.
August 10. Last night, Madhabi read aloud her play about Ramakrishna. It’s terrible. Poor thing, she was so embarrassed—and Vishwananda made things worse by shedding tears. I like her now, definitely.
Afterward, I went for a walk with Sudhira in the hills. She’s such a strange mixture: half of her so matter-of-fact and scientific, half of her as superstitious as any old Irish nanny. Her whole attitude to the shrine is superstitious, and she has endless stories of minor miracles which have happened around the house—pictures moving, dark figures appearing, etc. etc. On one occasion, an invisible man jumped off the roof and ran away down the street, after somebody had pronounced the Holy Name.172 I don’t believe a word of it, but I enjoy these fairy stories very much.
Sudhira has hardly ever been out of California in her life, and has never studied anything except medicine; and yet she’s very worldly-wise and has excellent natural taste in poetry and painting. She discovered D. H. Lawrence some years ago, and knows all his descriptions of the West.
Got up at 4:45 a.m. and went into the shrine for a long think—with the result that I nearly decided to tell Swami, “India is getting between me and God.”
Read Novalis’s diary. He’s so sweet. “Den Morgen hatte ich die fatale, drückende, bängliche Empfindung des eintretenden Schnup-fens.”173 “Früh weint ich sehr. Nach Tisch wieder.”174 Etc. etc.
August 13. Yesterday morning, while I was doing the worship, I suddenly thought, “If they do take me away from this place, why should I go to CPS camp?” Now that C.O.s have been guaranteed automatic induction into the Medical Corps, my objections to I-A-O don’t really hold water any longer. I’d refuse to do noncombatant military duty, but medical work is something else again: I can’t see why wounded men should be left to die simply because they happen to be soldiers. Or is this just a rationalization? I don’t know. As long as I’m here, I can’t judge any of my motives because they’re all colored by my wish to escape.
I asked Sudhira what she thought about the idea, this afternoon, as we drove out to the San Fernando Valley, to avoid rehearsing the Ram chant with Swami Vishwananda and, incidentally, to buy some chickens. Sudhira was all in favor. She’d join the Army Nursing Corps at once, if they’d let her through the medical exam. Chiefly because of restlessness, and also because she’s “opposed to foreign domination.” She told me that Madhabi is secretly planning to leave at the end of the month.
Sudhira didn’t know just where the chicken ranch was, and so we drove all over the valley, enjoying the ride anyhow, along old winding dirt roads where the eucalyptus trees have grown gigantic, and there are no new houses—nothing but a few tumbledown barns and shacks, half-hidden in the dark, secret, dusty green of the orange groves. It’s like another country altogether, and year by year it is being swallowed up into building estates and the slickness and self-advertisement of the new California. At last we found the ranch, quite near Universal Studios.
Augu
st 17. Yesterday, I spent the night at Alto Cedro with Peggy. Bill has left again; his leave is over. Peggy told me a funny thing about their marriage. Bill, who is very meticulous, had arranged everything. They were to go downtown on July 20, get married, and then spend the night at the Town House hotel, where Bill had booked a room and registered them as Dr. and Mrs. Kiskadden. Every last detail, apparently, had been taken care of—but at the last moment, Bill discovered that he’d entirely forgotten to arrange for a blood test for himself. (Peggy had gotten her certificate a few days earlier.) Frantic, he called all the doctors in town, and even tried to see if the authorities couldn’t waive the rule and allow the test to be made next day. But it was no use. So he and Peggy had to go back to the Town House and spend the night in sin and under false pretences. They were actually married, very quietly, on July 21. Peggy hasn’t told anybody else this story, because she says it would so humiliate Bill if it got around—not on account of the sin, but of the inefficiency.
Today I’ve moved down to Santa Monica Canyon for a few days’ rest from Ivar Avenue. I’ve taken a room in a house on Mabery Road, number 206, opposite the Viertels. Eduard Steuermann, Salka’s brother, is also in the house. The last occupant of the room was Liesl Neumann, a middle-aged character actress with whom Berthold is having an affair. She moved out today, having been unexpectedly called to New York for a part in a play about a Nazi boy who comes to an American household—Tomorrow the World. Liesl is a nice, kind, motherly woman, with strangely dirty habits. She left the bathtub with a huge ring of grime around it, and I’ve just had to burn some foul female garbage I found in the bathroom. The bedroom is pink, with a pseudo-Egyptian stencil of flowers. The whole house smells sour and shut-up. Eduard says this is due to years of bourgeois stuffiness and can’t be cured—but I’ve opened all the downstair windows, and it’s better already.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 50
