My Guru and His Disciple
Page 7
Gerald’s basic accusation was that Prabhavananda’s way of life violated the monastic standards of austerity; it was too social, too comfortable, too relaxed. The Swami had Hindu notions of hospitality and would often invite guests to lunch—some of them not even devotees, but just their relatives or friends. Appetizing meals were served—that is, if you liked curry—and they were not necessarily vegetarian. The Swami had a car at his disposal. He chain-smoked, which set a bad example to those who were struggling with their own addictions. The women waited on him hand and foot and he accepted their service as a matter of course. His relations with them—though doubtless absolutely innocent—could easily cause misunderstandings and suspicions among outsiders. For, after all, he was the only male in a household of females.
Even if Gerald’s letter was tactfully worded, it hurt Prabhavananda’s feelings deeply. “Mr. Hard had the cheek to write to me like that!” he exclaimed indignantly, in my presence. Later he answered Gerald indirectly in an article, “Renunciation and Austerity,” which he wrote for the magazine. Here are two quotations from it:
You would identify the life of renunciation with a life of poverty and discomfort and you would say that if a spiritual teacher lives in comfort and in a plentiful household he is evidently not living the consecrated life. Your view is too simple. A man of true renunciation concerns himself neither with poverty nor with riches. If the poor man hugs his few trivial possessions, he is as much attached and as much a worldly man as the rich man. Only the poor man is worse off—because of his envy.
Mere outward austerity is a degenerate form of ritualism. A spiritual soul never makes any demonstration of his renunciation or of his communion with God. He even sometimes raises external barriers to shield himself from the eyes of the curious.
(Was the Swami’s chain-smoking an “external barrier,” I wondered?)
* * *
Gerald kept repeating that his personal affection for Prabhavananda remained unchanged. Prabhavananda couldn’t, in any case, disown Gerald, his disciple; Gerald was much present, I am sure, in Prabhavananda’s mind and prayers throughout the rest of his life. But, after this, they didn’t see each other often. And when they did, they behaved with noticeable politeness.
Huxley was distressed. It is a disaster, he said, when two sincere practitioners of the spiritual life fall out with each other—especially since there are so few of them, anyway. “Judge not that ye be not judged,” he murmured to himself, several times—which suggested that he thought Gerald had been in the wrong.
Others may have thought so, too—or at least that Gerald’s criticism of Prabhavananda could be as justly turned against himself. If the outside world might object to the Swami’s life among women, mightn’t it object, even more strongly, to Gerald’s sharing a house with Chris Wood, who was unashamedly homosexual? If the Swami was to be accused of living comfortably, might not Gerald be accused of living in seeming poverty while enjoying invisible wealth in the form of food, lodging, transportation, and other services and goods provided by his friends? Gerald had said that the question of the Swami’s moral reputation was important because he had publicly set himself up as a religious teacher. But it could be retorted that Gerald was teaching his kind of religion just as publicly and on a much larger scale through his books.
Undoubtedly, a great deal of Gerald’s dislike of the atmosphere at the Vedanta Center was an expression of his own very different temperament. He recoiled from the women, with their chatter and laughter and bustle, because they were lively and vital and he was a life-hater. Although he could justify his attitude philosophically, saying that he longed to die in order to be free of space-time, there was an extra sourness to some of his remarks which seemed merely dyspeptic. As when, for example, he showed disgust for the human body as such, saying that the penis looks like a bit of loose gut hanging down from the abdomen; the hatred behind the simile was curiously shocking. Or when, on seeing me return sunburned and sweaty, in shorts, from cycling with Chris Wood, he exclaimed reproachfully, “What a grip on life you’ve got!”
Looking back after all these years, I don’t think Gerald was being in the least hypocritical when he wrote that letter to Prabhavananda. At the same time, it is obvious to me that Gerald’s dissociation of himself from the Vedanta Center was tactically necessary, in view of the new involvement which awaited him in the near future. In other words, his first move toward that future—the establishment of Trabuco College—was to break his ties to any particular religious group, and thus regain complete freedom of action.
I am not suggesting that Gerald consciously foresaw this already. But there is a part of the mind which does foresee and plan, far ahead of our conscious intentions; and it has its own ways of hinting to us what it intends, though without making itself embarrassingly clear. If Gerald had ignored the hinting of that planner and gone on collaborating with the Swami, I believe that the moment might well have come when the Swami would have had to dissociate himself from Gerald.
* * *
Gerald’s break with Prabhavananda had a side effect; it made me more valuable to the Vedanta Center. Not that I could ever make good the loss of Gerald’s spellbinding lectures and the increase they had caused in attendance and in cash donations. But I could at least give readings whenever the Swami was unable to appear, and I could take over the assistant editorship of the magazine.
I don’t think Prabhavananda had seriously expected that I would resign in sympathy with Gerald. Nevertheless, I felt that I had acquired the status of a non-deserter in his eyes and that he was fonder of me in consequence. Soon I found myself drawing closer to him for another, quite different reason.
In the middle of February, Vernon and I parted—not so much in anger as in mutual exasperation. We still loved each other, but not enough. We kept being jarred to the bone by each other’s self-will, and neither of us would give way.
We moved out of our house; I went to a hotel, Vernon found rooms not far off. I wished he would go back to New York and thus put a barrier between us. While he remained in Los Angeles, there was a danger that we might settle for a truce which wasn’t a reconciliation and couldn’t last. I missed him horribly. Without him, everything, from the war to my job at M-G-M, became less bearable. I saw Gerald nearly every day, largely because I could talk about Vernon to him. He did his best to be a sympathetic listener, which only made the situation more painful. My real support came from visits to Prabhavananda, because I couldn’t talk to him about Vernon—or at least not in the same self-pitying, self-tormenting way; I would have been ashamed to. Most of the time, I sat silent in his presence. Silence came naturally to him, and he accepted the silences of others without question. Meanwhile, I tried to draw strength from the atmosphere which I could nearly always feel surrounding him.
* * *
At his suggestion, I spent my first whole day of silence at the Center fasting and meditating. This sounds like an impressive austerity, but in practice it wasn’t. You weren’t allowed to talk to other people, but you could ask the Swami questions, about spiritual and philosophical problems. You were to take no solid food between dawn and dusk, but you might drink as much water or fruit juice as you wanted. You weren’t required to spend the whole day in the shrine room; you could read in the Swami’s study, or walk in the garden or up and down the street. I read several of the essays in Sri Aurobindo’s book on the Bhagavad-Gita, the first of the Hindu religious classics I was to study. The Swami told me to make japam while I walked and to give everybody I met on the street a mental blessing. You weren’t to think of yourself with a feeling of superiority, as a holy man blessing worldlings; you were simply saluting the Atman within each fellow human being.
When I sat in the shrine room, the smell of stale incense made me drowsy, and occasionally I dropped off into a doze. Yet the time didn’t seem wasted. It was like being on a long railroad journey in a foreign country at night. At least, I said to myself, the train must be taking me somewhere.
How much more alone he was than I, exiled among us aliens! What a stifling little prison 1946 Ivar Avenue must be for a still vigorous, subtly intelligent man of powerful emotions, cut off from everything he had known and loved in his youth. Imagine what it must mean to have to accept our distasteful Western ways, our grossness of perception, and be resigned to trying to teach us, every day until he died. Yes, this was a life sentence, stretching out before him in its appalling tameness and sameness. How could he bear it? How had he borne it so long?
Prabhavananda’s answer was staring me right in the face. It was embodied in that quaint piece of Oriental furniture which so improbably contained a fragment of incarnate God. But could I ever find it there for myself—that other, almost unimaginable kind of togetherness? I wasn’t even sure yet that I wanted to find it. Maybe the price was too high.
Seven
In March 1941 I moved into an apartment which had unexpectedly become vacant, just around the corner from the house in which Gerald and Chris lived. Early in May, the first term of my contract with M-G-M expired. I told the studio that I didn’t want to renew it, giving as my reason that I expected to be drafted soon as a conscientious objector. My employers were polite about this, seeming almost to approve. Perhaps, in the psychological confusion of that ante-bellum period, any kind of war involvement, even as an objector to war, appeared somewhat enviable and admirable to those who were still civilians.
Then Denny arrived back from Pennsylvania. The biodynamic farm hadn’t been a success, chiefly because he and the farmer hadn’t liked each other. Meanwhile, Denny had been classified by his draft board as a conscientious objector (4-E). He would be called up to work in a forestry camp in the fairly near future.
I had invited him to stay with me at the apartment. For as long as we might be together, we decided to try an experiment in intentional living, following a relaxed version of Gerald’s schedule—three hours of meditation a day, instead of six.
Every morning, when our alarm clock rang, we got out of our beds in silence and began our first hour of meditation, he in the living room, I in the bedroom. He washed and dressed first, then fixed breakfast while I washed and dressed. As we sat down to eat, we broke our silence by saying “Good morning.” After breakfast, I did the dishes and whatever minor housecleaning was necessary. After this, we took turns reading aloud to each other from some “religious” book. One of these was William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which we both condemned for its sloppy, imprecise style and academic approach to its subject. Actually, we were showing off to each other. We liked to think of ourselves as being now in a kind of front-line trench, actively engaged in spiritual combat and therefore entitled to sneer, as combat troops sneer at a war story by a non-combatant. Denny’s favorite comments were “Mary, how pretentious can you get?” and “How she dare!”
At twelve, we began our second hour of meditation. Then we had lunch. If we went out in the car during the afternoon, we took our book with us and the non-driver read it to the driver. This was supposed to keep us from watching for sexy pedestrians. It didn’t, but it did divide the driver’s attention by three—book, pedestrian, road—instead of by two, and was therefore the cause of several near-accidents. Our third hour was from six to seven. Then we had supper, the meal we both looked forward to—it was leisurely, with no duties ahead of us. We seldom went out after it, because we had banned movies as distractions. We were usually in bed by nine-thirty.
We had agreed that we would give up sex, including masturbation. This was made easier by the fact that we didn’t find each other in the least sexually attractive. However, while keeping to the agreement, we talked about sex constantly, boasting of our past conquests and adventures. No doubt the underground opposition forces in Denny and myself were working together to sabotage our experiment. But their strategy was crude and unlikely to succeed. If our sex talk excited us, up to a point, it also acted as a safety valve. We might have built up a far greater lust pressure if we had strictly refrained from mentioning the subject.
On the whole, those weeks of May and June were unexpectedly happy. After the loneliness which followed my parting from Vernon, I found Denny’s companionship exactly what I needed. The day lived itself, our timetable removed all anxieties about what we should be doing next. We were continually occupied, and everything we did seemed enjoyable and significant. The apartment was curiously delightful to be in, because of the atmosphere we were creating. I don’t remember our having one real quarrel.
It was our experiment which held us together. Neither of us could make it work alone, even for a day; we had to cooperate. There was no time for moods, sulks, caprices; if any psychological trouble showed signs of developing, we had to acknowledge its presence at once and then proceed to discuss it out of existence. There was no question of one of us succeeding and the other failing; this wasn’t a competition. There was only one alternative to continuing the experiment—dropping it altogether. That we should drop it became less and less likely as the weeks passed and Denny’s call-up to the camp grew more and more imminent. Why give up so late in the game?
Denny contributed more to the success of our experiment than I did, both materially and morally. He was an inventive cook and he had the knack of homemaking. He wasn’t ashamed to demand comfort from his surroundings. My puritanism felt guilty about demanding comfort, although I enjoyed it if it was provided for me. More importantly, it was Denny who made the greater effort to keep us following our daily schedule. As I now see, this was because he had much more to lose than I had if we failed. This was the last bridge he hadn’t burned.
Denny was then at a critical stage in his life. He had returned to the States after a series of quarrels with his wealthy lovers, well aware that he had behaved every bit as badly as they had, if not worse. Then he had broken with the friends in Los Angeles who had laughed at him for becoming interested in Vedanta. Then (according to his version) Prabhavananda had rejected him as despicable, rotten, and unworthy to receive spiritual instruction. Then he had gone to work on the biodynamic farm and had failed to make good and thus be a credit to Gerald. And now, finally, his relations with Gerald himself were deteriorating.
No doubt there had always been some friction between them. Denny could be sharp-edged, sour, and rude, and he was chronically suspicious of the motives of others. (In Down There on a Visit, I have presented the Denny–Paul character as a kind of touchstone which reveals whatever elements of falseness are present within the people who are exposed to it.) Denny couldn’t resist challenging Gerald’s authority as a teacher and mocking his old-maidish fastidiousness, his affectations of speech, his evasiveness, his Irish blarney. Gerald, who was extremely sensitive to any hint of criticism, began to withdraw, injured. Soon Denny—and therefore I—had stopped seeing him unless it was absolutely necessary. I can’t pretend that I had tried very hard to prevent this from happening. I realized that it would be far easier to live with Denny if I kept him to myself as much as possible.
* * *
Through the Huxleys, we heard of a lady who taught hatha-yoga exercises. We wanted to learn these for purely athletic reasons, so we were glad to find that she didn’t set herself up as a spiritual guru, like some other hatha-yoga practitioners. The exercises did make us feel wonderfully healthy. They also filled up most of the time we had free from other occupations.
Our teacher, though perhaps a lot older than she looked, was the embodiment of suppleness and serpentine charm. A serpent who was also a perfect lady, she never lost her social poi
se. Having explained that the air which is passed through the body in the air-swallowing exercise should come out “quite odorless,” she merely smiled in playful reproach when we discharged vile-smelling farts.
I felt that I ought to tell the Swami about our lessons—guessing that he might not altogether approve of them. The violence of his disapproval surprised me. He didn’t object to the postures and the stretching but he warned me sternly not to practice those breathing exercises which require you to hold your breath; they can cause hallucinations, he said, and end by damaging the brain. In 1935, when he made a return visit to India with Sister Lalita, he had met one of his former fellow monks who had since left the monastery and taken up hatha-yoga. This ex-monk was the same age as Prabhavananda and therefore already in his forties, but he looked like a boy of eighteen and behaved like a half-witted child, giggling meaninglessly. The usual justification for the practice of hatha-yoga is that it strengthens the body in preparation for spiritual austerities. But Prabhavananda seemed to regard it merely as an indulgence of physical vanity. “What is the matter with you, Mr. Isherwood?” he asked me reproachfully. “Surely you do not want Etarnal Youth?” I was silent and hung my head—because, of course, I did.
When I questioned our teacher—as tactfully as I could and without mentioning Prabhavananda—about the possible dangers of the breathing exercises, she laughed at the idea but then conceded that if you practiced them rigorously, for many hours each day throughout a number of years, you could perhaps do yourself harm. So I was left in a state of indecision, not wanting to disobey Prabhavananda yet not feeling that I need give up our lessons altogether.
Then, however, our teacher began to urge us to learn the yoga technique of washing out the intestines by muscular action alone; you squat in a bowl full of water, suck the water in through the anus, swirl it around inside you, expel it again, thus cleansing yourself of poisons. Until this technique has been mastered, you should use an enema every day. And meanwhile, the sphincter muscle of the anus must be made more flexible, through dilation … A set of rectal dilators now appeared. I use that verb advisedly because I can neither remember nor imagine our serpent lady actually giving us such unladylike objects. Did Denny perhaps procure them? The largest was a wicked-looking dildo, quite beyond my capacity but dangerously tempting to my curiosity. I told Denny that, at least as far as I was concerned, our lessons would have to stop—lest sex should sneak in through the back door. We parted from our teacher but continued to do some of the exercises at home. (Years later I took to using the breathing exercises occasionally, because I found them helpful in clearing up obstinate hangovers.)