Three swamis had come to Portland for the ceremonies—Vishwananda, Ashokananda, and Vividishananda of Seattle. Vishwananda had already made himself completely at home, just as in Hollywood. He spent his days eating, chanting, and playing the harmonium. I loved him at breakfast, when he clapped his hands as though he were at some Asian inn, and shouted, “Bring eggs!”
On October 9, there was one more ceremony, the laying of the foundation stone for a future temple. This was to be built on a large piece of land belonging to the Vedanta Society and already being used as a retreat by the devotees, several miles outside the city.
Most of the land was covered by a birch forest, with some wooden houses in it, looking very Scandinavian. The swamis gathered, in their yellow robes, at the spot where the stone was to be laid. It started to drizzle. Ashokananda teasingly told Vishwananda to go and pray for the rain to stop. Vishwananda waddled off by himself among the trees. The rain stopped. He returned, amidst humorous but surprised applause. The ceremony began. The drizzle started again. “Go and pray some more,” said Ashokananda. Vishwananda sighed: “The second time is more difficult.” But he went off obediently, nevertheless—only to return, an instant later, gasping and trotting; he had disturbed a nest of wild bees. The rain continued and we finished the ceremony under umbrellas.
One of the devotees, an old lady, offered to pay for my training as a monk, because “you boys are doing such splendid work.”
After Portland, I went on up to Seattle, to stay a night at the Center there before returning to Los Angeles. Ashokananda and Vividishananda were with me on the train.
As soon as we crossed the Oregon–Washington state line, Ashokananda began what became a tiresomely prolonged would-be humorous bullying of Vividishananda. When we discovered that the train had no dining car, he declared that Vividishananda was responsible, since Washington was his state. Vividishananda merely smiled and said nothing.
The Seattle Center was much smaller than either of the others I had just visited. Vividishananda had only one monk who actually lived with him in his house. This was a young man who had lately been demobilized from the Army. He seemed quite as devoted to Vividishananda as George was to Prabhavananda; but, unlike George, he took his renunciation a shade too grimly—or so I thought. After telling me that he and Vividishananda went for a daily walk through the park, he added: “But we shan’t be able to do that when summer comes, because the girls lie around there in swimming suits.”
Vividishananda’s smiling quietness was impressive. He appeared to take religion as a matter of course—how else could one spend one’s life? I imagined myself as his disciple. He would claim my every waking moment—no time-wasting chatter, no self-indulgent scribblings, no sex fantasies. I might develop genuine austerity. But I should also develop a terminal illness and escape from him by dying within the year. Devatmananda would keep me orbiting around him in a whirl of chores; all I should ever learn from him would be how to fix the plumbing. I hadn’t the temperament for utter submission to Ashokananda, even though I realized that it might do wonders for me spiritually; he would goad me to defiance and revolt. As for Vishwananda, whom I was now growing deeply fond of, my joining him at the Chicago Center could well have disastrous results for both of us. I could see myself sinking with him into gluttony, and even seducing him into becoming my drinking companion.
No—for me, it was Prabhavananda or nobody.
November 19. A lot of time has gone by, but little news. My position is exactly the same. The shrine is always with us. As long as some contact is maintained with it, all is simple and possible. As soon as contact is broken, all is horrible, tense, confused.
The other day, Swami said to me, “Do you know what purity is, Chris? Purity is telling the truth.”
Two soldiers are walking past the temple. One of them looks at it and I hear him exclaim: “Boy! The guy who built that thing sure had a screwy wife!”
* * *
By the end of October, Swami and I had finished a rough draft of our translation of the Gita. Since then, we had been revising it, with the help of a friend of mine, Margaret Kiskadden. This revision was carried out with increasing but still unshared misgivings, as far as Mrs. Kiskadden and I were concerned. At last, on November 22, she reached the brink of frankness and confessed that she didn’t think our version was really any better than most of the others—which we had been criticizing for their obscurity and archaic un-English locutions; it was dull and it was clumsy and it reeked of Sanskrit. She further confessed that she had shown part of our version to Aldous, that they had discussed it, and that he had agreed with her opinion.
It was an awful moment, because, once she’d said this, its truth was only too obvious. I felt a wave of depression sweep over me—and Swami, seeing how I felt, suddenly turned very small and gray and shriveled, a bird on a winter bough.
And then—it was really amazing—I saw in a flash what to do. I ran back to my room with the manuscript.
Our version began: “Oh, changeless Krishna, drive my chariot between the two armies which are eager for battle, that I may see those whom I shall have to fight in this coming war. I wish to see the men who have assembled here, taking the side of the enemy in order to please the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra.”
In about half an hour, I had turned this into:
Krishna the changeless,
Halt my chariot
There where the warriors,
Bold for the battle,
Face their foemen.
Between the armies
There let me see them,
The men I must fight with,
Gathered together
Now at the bidding
Of him their leader,
Blind Dhritarashtra’s
Evil offspring:
Such are my foes
In the war that is coming.
I brought this back and showed it to them, and they were both excited. I’m excited myself, because it opens up all sorts of possibilities, and I now realize how horribly bored I was with the old translation. I don’t see my way clearly yet, but obviously this method can be applied throughout the book. There should be several different kinds of verse, and I think I can vary the prose style, too. We are going to Aldous this evening, to discuss the whole thing with him.
What had I actually done, during that half hour? I had turned a passage of creaky antiqued prose into some lines of verse which were alliterated and heavily stressed in imitation of an Old English epic. Why? Because I had felt a sudden urge to get the show on the road. The prose had dragged its feet. The verse was brisk and catchy, it seemed to be going somewhere. At least, I had said to myself, I won’t let the reader fall asleep on page one.
Thus described, my action sounds irresponsible, frivolous, merely desperate. But, even then, I knew that it wasn’t—that I was taking this first step in accordance with an overall plan for rewriting our translation, unclear to me as yet but definitely workable. I was also beginning to see how such a plan could be justified.
Considered simply as a work of literature, the Gita is not a unity, except in the sense that it is all composed in the same kind of Sanskrit verse. It has several quite distinct aspects. If you have to choose between translating it into English verse or prose, prose seems preferable, because much of the material doesn’t lend itself easily to the capacities of English verse. (The Sanskrit original is, from an English point of view, unnaturally terse and compressed; translated literally, it would become a poem written in telegrams.) It is at least arguable that a mixture of verse and prose is better than either medium used exclusively; that both are needed to present the Gita in its full variety.
To begin with, the Gita is epic. It was composed to fit into another, far larger epic poem, the Mahabharata—the story of the descendants of King Bharata (Maha means “great”), who lived in ancient India. At a certain point in that story, Arjuna, one of its warrior heroes, is about to lead his men in a civil war against the army of his foster
brother, who has tricked him and his natural brothers out of the kingdom they should have inherited. Arjuna is a friend and disciple of Krishna, who is living on earth in human form. Krishna agrees to be with Arjuna throughout the battle as his charioteer, but he will not join in the fighting.
It is here that the Gita takes up the story, naming the leading warriors on both sides and telling how Arjuna asks Krishna to drive him into the no-man’s-land between the armies, so that he may see the men he is about to fight against. When Arjuna does see them, he realizes that many are his kinsmen or old friends, and he exclaims that he would rather die than kill them. He begs Krishna to advise him what to do.
Thus far, the Gita has preserved the epic character of the Mahabharata. But now, as Krishna begins to reason with and instruct Arjuna, it becomes a quite different kind of literary work, having sometimes the character of a gospel, sometimes that of a philosophical discourse. The gospel passages are often poetic in feeling; the discourse passages, translated into English, seem to demand prose; verse would only make them prosy.
Krishna himself has different tones of voice. Sometimes he speaks as God, sometimes as man. Like Jesus, he speaks as God in the aspect of Protector, telling Arjuna to take refuge in him. But he also appears to Arjuna in the aspect of God transcendent, within whose being all creation is contained. Arjuna, who has begged Krishna to grant him this vision, is terrified by its majesty, its blinding brilliance, and the thunder of its speech. Krishna calms his fears by reappearing in human form, as Arjuna’s familiar friend. In this aspect, he speaks simply and affectionately. Then, as Krishna returns to his discourse, his tone changes again. He explains the nature of action, the practice of renunciation and meditation, the forces which activate the universe, and the respective temperaments and spiritual duties of different kinds of individual. While doing this, he often uses Sanskrit philosophical terms which require footnotes to explain them; they have no exact equivalents in English. His tone rises, now and then, to thrilling passages of lyrical declaration; more often, it has the quietness of absolute authority—a university lecture delivered by God.
In conclusion, Krishna tells Arjuna that he must fight, because this is his dharma—the duty which is imposed upon him by his own nature. Arjuna is a member of the warrior caste and he has accepted the responsibilities of a military leader. He cannot now impulsively disown his dharma and try to obey some other concept of duty; a dharma which is not naturally his will lead him into spiritual confusion. And Krishna adds: “If you say ‘I will not fight,’ your resolve is vain. Your own nature will drive you to the act.”
(It was of special importance to me, as a pacifist, to learn that the Gita doesn’t sanction war—as some have claimed—any more than it sanctions pacifism. It cannot, from its absolute standpoint, do either. It leaves each individual to discover what his or her dharma is.)
Arjuna has been convinced by Krishna’s teachings. He agrees to fight. Thus, the Gita ends. The Mahabharata, continuing its story, tells that the battle lasted eighteen days and resulted in total victory for Arjuna and his brothers.
* * *
I don’t remember that Swami ever made any objection to the method I was about to use in rewriting our translation. Yet this was a delicate subject. By questioning the literary unity of the Gita, I had come near to raising another question: Is the Gita a philosophical unity? Many scholars have declared that it isn’t—that it contains additions and alterations made at later periods by philosophers of differing schools and that it shows the influence of Buddhist and even of Christian thought. Swami was too well educated not to be able to see a certain justification for such criticisms; but his whole soul rebelled against them. To him, since childhood, the Gita had been sacred—every line of it equally so. If I couldn’t share his feeling, I could at least take his side by stirring up the prejudice of my college days to damn these dull academic dogs whose noses were trained only to sniff out a “corrupt” text.
Looking through our Gita today, I find many transitions from prose to verse or from verse to prose which I can’t justify logically. I must have made them purely by ear and often just to keep changing the pace. But Swami, whose faith in my literary taste was stronger even than mine in his spiritual discrimination, passed nearly everything—only objecting, occasionally and very mildly, when I used a word or phrase which strayed too far from its Sanskrit original.
* * *
The rough draft of the revision was quickly finished—so quickly, indeed, that my accomplishment became a household legend; Swami even hinted that I had been divinely inspired. I was pleased with myself but also well aware that this praise came from friends who knew nothing of the world of the theater and the film studios. I, who had seen a script reconstructed before breakfast, a song composed while the actors waited on stage, knew that such so-called miracles are not uncommon. I suspect that they are often the result of simultaneous but divided activities in the creative mind. You have no faith in the version of the book or play you are working on but are unwilling to change it, telling yourself that this would mean a lot of trouble and that time is short. Meanwhile, however, a rebellious element inside you has secretly created its own anti-version, complete down to the last detail, and is waiting for a chance to produce and impose it. If the rebellion succeeds, outside observers are amazed at the speed and smoothness with which the takeover is accomplished.
Rebellions may be made smoothly, but never without causing psychological disturbance. In my own case, I suddenly felt that I couldn’t work under such pressure unless I started smoking again. (I had given up the habit with difficulty in 1941, because I was upset about my parting from Vernon and wanted to raise my morale by asserting my willpower.) When I lit my first cigarette, I felt so sick to my stomach that I had to run out into the garden for air. But I persisted, and soon I was chain-smoking as compulsively as Swami himself.
Eleven
January 3, 1944. Swami and several of us went to see The Song of Bernadette. On the whole, Swami approved of it. He liked the deathbed scene and the vision of the Lady because, he told us, visions usually appear in the corner of a room, and that’s what happens in this film. Needless to say, he was convinced that the roses on the Lady’s feet were really lotuses. He is extraordinarily obstinate on this point. As for me, I had a real good cry, from about reel two onwards, and greatly enjoyed myself.
January 13. Yesterday, Swami gave a lecture on Vedanta to a Young Methodists’ club at U.C.L.A. He was disgusted by the students’ behavior. The girls sat on the boys’ laps throughout.
Sarada has become a Song of Bernadette addict. Whenever anybody wants to see it, she goes along with them.
January 14. With Swami out land shopping for the new center. A realtor showed us a marvelous property high up in the hills above Brentwood, with a view over Santa Monica Bay and across the city to Mount Wilson and Baldy. But it would cost hundreds of thousands to develop. No road, even.
The idea of moving the Center away from Hollywood to the outskirts of the city had been in Swami’s mind for some time. I don’t think he regarded the matter as urgent, but he enjoyed land shopping just for its own sake. He had an eye for real estate, and he could become surprisingly businesslike when asking questions about prices and the terms of a mortgage.
February 18. Richard’s parents are here—just back from visiting Rich at the San Diego Marine Base. He’ll go overseas soon. He is the camp eccentric. Everybody knows and likes him.
Perhaps the only thing that would ever reconcile me entirely to this place would be having someone here I could talk to as I talk to Denny; someone who, at the same time, was convinced of the necessity for this way of life and absolutely determined to stick it out here.
February 28. Swami has been sick. Now he’s recovered. He sits on the sofa and we forget him. We play, unmindful, like children, in the completely uninteresting certainty of their father’s love. If we cut our fingers we’ll remember and run to him at once. Our demand on him is total and quite merc
iless. We demand that he will be here, now, tomorrow, whenever we decide we want him.
During that spring, I again met the beautiful young man Denny had introduced me to in Santa Monica the previous August. I will call him Alfred, because I happen to find that name unromantic and asexual; beauty such as his demands a foil.
Alfred and I started seeing each other often, and soon I felt very much involved with him emotionally. This I called being in love with him, but it would have been truer to say that I identified him with my desire to escape from the Center; he embodied the joys of being on the Outside.
Alfred himself couldn’t have been sweeter about this. Although not in love, he liked me and was ready for sex whenever I wanted it. Throughout the next year, he treated me with the consideration and understanding of a true friend. I sometimes treated him as one of the seven deadly sins, which might be overcome by overindulgence. In such moods, my attitude was: Let me go to bed with you so I can get tired of you.
April 13. Was horrid to Sudhira, because she’d allowed a friend of hers to read one of my stories. The rationalization for my behavior was that, a day or two ago, Swami said to someone in my presence: “Why do you read novels? All books that do not give the word of God are just a trash.” So I worked this up into a sulk, the usual kind—that I’m not “understood” here, that Swami hates Art, and that this is what keeps all my friends away from the Center, etc.
Actually—don’t I know it all too well?—I’m merely sulking because I want to run off and play around Alfred. I worked off some spite at the committee meeting of the Vedanta Society by announcing that I’d resign from being president this year.
April 14. Swami, sitting on the steps outside the temple this morning, asked me so sweetly why I’d resigned from the committee. I put it that I dislike taking any official position here because I want to feel free to walk out at a moment’s notice. Swami accepted this as though it were the whole truth—and, as usual, his love and utter lack of egotism melted me completely. I suppose that’s what Brahmananda did to you; you felt he was more on your side than you were yourself.
My Guru and His Disciple Page 13