My Guru & His Disciple (23 page)

I was hugely impressed by the dramatic power with which Gerald delivered his warning, but I simply couldn't take it seriously. I felt that this was his literary self speaking—especially since he had just written an excellent supernatural thriller in which a man performs a black-magical ritual to destroy his enemy, and consequently gets haunted by a familiar spirit in the form of a fox.
The Black Fox
was the title of Gerald's novel.

It wasn't that I pooh-poohed the idea that one could be possessed by a familiar. I had a wholesome respect for the dangers of dabbling in black magic and would never have done so under any circumstances. What I didn't believe was that one could fall into its power without somehow cooperating. My recent life had been sex-absorbed and drunken and angry, but certainly not devilish; I was sure I had never done anything to deserve the attentions of a black fox. As for losing my faith, the opposite was true. In my present dilemma, it was actually getting stronger. Indeed, I was beginning to think that it might drag me back to the Center, against my will.

August 23. This morning, on a sudden impulse, I drove to Trabuco and saw Swami and talked to him about the possibility of coming to live up there, or in Hollywood. I was careful not to commit myself but of course Swami now takes it for granted that I'm coming.

He said that both Gerald and Aldous had come to him and told him things about the way I am living, and asked him to remonstrate with me. Swami had answered, “Why don't you pray for him?”

I was touched and delighted by Swami's reaction, which I interpreted as a rebuke to Gerald and Aldous. Wasn't he telling them, in effect, “You'd do better to love Chris more and criticize him less”? That was what I wanted him to have meant. It did annoy me that the two of them had spoken to Swami behind my back—and yet, what else could I have expected? They regarded me as an irresponsible child. You don't interfere with the doings of other people's children, you go to the parent. When I asked Swami what it was that they had told him, he said vaguely that I'd been seen “in some bad place”—the nature of the place didn't seem to interest him. It could only have been a homosexual bar. But who could have seen me there? Obviously neither Gerald nor Aldous in person. No doubt it was some miserable demi-devotee with a foot in both worlds; just like myself, six years ago. He must have feared that I'd recognized
him
at that bar, and relieved his own guilt by reporting me and my improper behavior.

I found it much easier to forgive Aldous for his interference than Gerald. Aldous didn't know any better, he was essentially a square. Happily, my resentment against Gerald was to disappear before long, because of a profound change he made in his own outlook.

August 29. I have to admit that I'm hardly meditating at all under my present living conditions, and that I would do far more at Trabuco. But Trabuco is what I shrink from. I dread the boredom of the place and the isolation. I shouldn't be a good companion for the boys. And I remember all the difficulties of my life at the Hollywood Center.

What I now dimly begin to see is that there must be no more categorical relationships, as far as I'm concerned. I believe that's what went wrong between Caskey and me, and the Center and me—trying to ensure permanence by getting yourself involved, that's no good. No good saying, “Now I'm married” or “Now I'm a monk,” and
therefore
I'm committed.

Without some awareness of God and some movement of the will toward Him, everything else is madness and nonsense. It's far better to feel alienated from God than to feel nothing. I shrink from “the spiritual life” because I immediately visualize the circumstances which usually surround it—the intense-eyed seekers coming to ask questions after lectures, the puttering at the pujas, the dreadfully harmless table humor. But all this is aesthetic snobbery—and unnecessary. If you don't like gymnasiums, don't go to them. You can exercise anywhere. Yes, but mind you do exercise.

An appalling confession: during the past years, I've very very seldom prayed for Caskey.

I don't remember breaking the news to Swami that I wasn't going to rejoin the monastery, after all. Probably I let things drift and said nothing. And soon I was excused from giving him an immediate answer by an unexpected development in my worldly life. John van Druten had decided to make a play (
I Am a Camera
) out of certain parts of my novel
Goodbye to Berlin.
In the fall of 1951, I left California for New York, to sit in on the play's rehearsals. Later I visited England and Germany and Bermuda, remaining away from Los Angeles until April 1952.

*   *   *

While in New York, I stayed for a time with Auden. We had met often during my earlier trips East, but that had nearly always been in the presence of other people. Now we were alone together in his apartment and able to have long, intimate talks, as in the old days.

We talked a great deal about Wystan's Christian beliefs without getting into any arguments. And I showed him entries in my diary describing my life at the Vedanta Center. He shook his head over them, regretfully: “All this heathen mumbo jumbo—I'm sorry, my dear, but it just
won't do.
” Then, in the abrupt, dismissive tone which he used when making an unwilling admission, he added: “Your Swami's quite obviously a saint, of course.”

Fourteen

May 12, 1952. At Trabuco. I've been here since the 4th and plan to stay till the 21st. The Patanjali aphorisms are practically finished.

Now I'm trying to finish part one of my novel before I leave here. I feel very calm and in a way unwilling to leave. But I don't for a moment seriously consider becoming a monk again. I don't consider anything except how to get my novel written. My only worries are financial—how much of my “Camera” royalties should be set aside for income tax?

J., one of the monks, describes this group as “six individualists all going different ways.” Yet they are wonderfully harmonious with each other, and all likable. “Too many people around here,” says J., “are scared of the Old Man” (meaning Swami) “or they've got him figured all wrong. He's the only person I ever met in my life I like everything about.”

I try to fit in unobtrusively and not get in the way of their routine. Am not getting much—or indeed anything, consciously—out of the meditation periods. But I often feel very happy. Hardly any trouble with sex, yet. I think that's mostly middle age. Anyhow, I certainly needed a rest!

I feel sympathy and liking for these boys, but their problems aren't very real to me, because their situation is so utterly different from mine. They are stuck here. They plod around in their heavy work boots, much of the day, doing outdoor chores. Life here is much more physical than it was at the Hollywood Center. The place demands to be constantly maintained and they are stuck with it, like soldiers with a war. I'm like a correspondent, visiting the front for a few days only.

The chores I do are voluntary and therefore pleasurable—pulling weeds out of the vines or raking the kitchen garden in the blazing sunshine. The hot courtyard with the dark-leaved fruit trees has a sort of secret stillness; one feels hidden away, miles from anywhere. At night we look through the telescope, at Saturn, or at the ranger station on the top of the mountain.

May 19. Shall be going back to Santa Monica the day after tomorrow. I've done wonders of work since I arrived here. Finished Patanjali, finished part one of my novel and made a promising start on part two, worked over some Vedic prayers Swami wanted translated, written lots of letters, and pulled up lots of weeds.

When I typed out the title page of the Patanjali this morning, I wrote “by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood,” and Swami said, “Why put
and
, Chris? It separates us.”

It's impossible to convey the sweetness and meaning with which he said this. All day long, he fairly shines with love. It was the same when he was here earlier, at the beginning of my stay, and told us: “If you have a friend and do good things for him for years and years, and then do one bad thing—he'll never forgive you. But if you do bad things to God for years and years, and only one good thing—
that
He never forgets.” What strikes me, again and again, is his complete assurance, and his smiling, almost sly air of having a private source of information.

I asked Swami how it is that he can always end a meditation period so punctually. He said it's like being able to sleep and wake up at a certain time, no matter how deeply you become absorbed. The notion that meditation periods should be of varying length, according to mood, is “romantic,” he said.

*   *   *

January 27, 1953. Have been here at Trabuco since January 9. (On the 6th, Caskey and I said goodbye and he left for San Francisco, hoping to get a job on a freighter and ship out to the Orient.)

Today I finished the rough draft of my novel. I am very grateful for this tremendous breakthrough. 88 pages in 18 days, which is about two and a half times my normal writing speed, maintained despite the interruptions of shrine sitting, kitchen chores, ditch digging, and planting trees. I feel as if my whole future as a writer—even my sanity—had been at stake. And yet I daresay I seemed quite cheerful and relaxed, to the others. Such struggles go on deep underground.

This has been the toughest of all my literary experiences. A sheer frontal attack on a laziness block so gross and solid that it seemed sentient and malevolent—the Devil as incarnate tamas, or Goethe's eternally no-saying Mephistopheles. What with having given up smoking, getting no drink and no sex, I was nearly crazy with tension. I actually said to Ramakrishna in the shrine: “If it's your will that I finish this thing, then help me.”

The diary version of my prayer to Ramakrishna needs further explanation. I had had, since childhood, an instinctive dislike of petitionary prayer—those church appeals to the Boss God for rain, the good health of the Monarch, victory in war. Swami didn't totally condemn it, but to me there was a sort of impertinence in asking God for the fulfillment of any worldly need. How was I to know what I really needed? I felt this all the more strongly because I didn't doubt that such prayers are quite often answered—or, to put it in another way, that you can sometimes impose your self-will on circumstances which
appear
to be outside your control. When I prayed, it was nearly always for some kind of spiritual reassurance or strength, for faith or devotion.

This prayer to Ramakrishna was therefore a breach of my own rule. What made me break it? I must have been reacting to the pressure which Swami had already begun putting on me, to write a biography of Ramakrishna. He was thus creating a conflict of interest between his project and mine. So I appealed to Ramakrishna to decide the issue. I remember feeling at the time that this was a kind of sophisticated joke—camp about prayer, rather than prayer itself. But camp, according to my definition, must always have a basis of seriousness. Ramakrishna would understand this perfectly.

My prayer could have been better phrased as follows: “Don't let me feel guilty about trying to write this novel. Either convince me that I must drop it altogether, or else take away my writer's block, so I can finish my book quickly and get started on yours.”

I have recorded this simply as a psychological experience, not as a proof that Ramakrishna answered my prayer. The unbeliever will maintain that prayer is just oneself talking to oneself, and the Vedantist will partly agree with him, saying that it is the Atman talking to the Atman, since all else is illusion, from an absolute standpoint. Looking back, I can no longer blame Mephistopheles—or whatever one chooses to call the force that blocks an act of creation—even though he did nearly cause me to have a nervous breakdown. Indeed, I feel I ought to be grateful to him. He at least tried to stop me finishing what turned out to be my worst novel:
The World in the Evening.

*   *   *

That spring, I realized that I had fallen deeply in love with a boy whom I had known for only a short while, Don Bachardy. He was then eighteen years old. The thirty-year difference in our ages shocked some of those who knew us. I myself didn't feel guilty about this, but I did feel awed by the emotional intensity of our relationship, right from its beginning; the strange sense of a fated, mutual discovery. I knew that, this time, I had really committed myself. Don might leave me, but I couldn't possibly leave him, unless he ceased to need me. This sense of a responsibility which was almost fatherly made me anxious but full of joy.

Don's first meeting with Swami was on May 21; Swami came with George to visit us. Don now remembers that “his gestures seemed very precise and delicate, the length of his hands impressed me, they were like long delicate fins; I was able to observe him physically because he didn't try to impress you with his personality, the way most people do.”

All I now remember is that Swami made some approving remark about the look in Don's face. Others had noticed this, but their comments merely referred to a vitality, a shining eagerness for experience, which often moves us when we see it in the young. Swami, as I well knew, was able to detect more intrinsic values; he was like a jeweler who can recognize at a glance the water of a diamond. From that moment, I felt that Don, and thus our relationship, was accepted by him.

*   *   *

Gerald, too, accepted and approved of Don. Indeed, he spoke of our relationship as if it were a daring pioneer research project of great scientific importance, urging me to keep a day-to-day record of it. He had now begun to discuss publicly the problems of “the intergrade,” meaning the homosexual, and the role which homosexuals might play in social evolution. He had also made what was, for him, a truly revolutionary pronouncement: “One used to believe that tenderness is polar to lust. Now one realizes that that isn't necessarily true.”