* * *
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.”
All this was only part of an astonishing and mysterious transformation. For Gerald’s health had greatly improved, and he seemed less dyspeptic, less puritanical, warmer, merrier. He could now be persuaded to accept an occasional glass of sherry and would sometimes even eat meat. One happy result of this transformation was that he and I resumed our old friendship, with Don included in it.
* * *
These are two dreams which I had about Swami during 1953:
August 21. I was sharing a bed with Swami in a house which I knew to be a male whorehouse. (I knew this but I don’t know how I knew it; there were no other people in the dream, and the room was an ordinary, quite respectable-looking bedroom.) Except that we were sharing a bed, our relations were as they always are. I was full of respect and consideration for him. We were just about to get up and I suggested that he should use the bathroom first. He didn’t react to this. But he said, “I’ve got a new mantram for you, Chris. It is: ‘Always dance.’” “What a strange mantram!” I said. Swami laughed: “Yes, it surprised me, too. But I found it in the scriptures.”
December 16. This dream was a kind of companion piece to the other, for Swami and I were again in a bedroom. This time, I didn’t know that we were in a whorehouse. My vague impression was that this was a hotel and that we were there because we were making a journey together. I was helping Swami get undressed to go to bed. I felt eager to attend to all his wants and was very respectful, as before. When I tried to help him put on his bathrobe, we found that it had somehow got entangled with mine—the sleeves of my robe were pulled down into his. Swami said, “Oh, so you have a bathrobe? I was going to give you mine.” And I said, “But I can throw mine away.”
The mood in both these dreams was joyful, but there was more fun in the first of them and more sentiment in the second. My bringing Swami into a whorehouse suggests to me a desire to introduce him to another part of my life, in which he had no share. (Actually, I had had very little experience of whorehouses myself; and that had been years earlier.) This dream whorehouse, where no boys are visible, seems symbolic, anyhow. Sharing a bed with Swami represents a situation of absolute chastity. Perhaps this was inspired by a memory of my sensations while using Swami’s bedroom, when he was away from the Center, in 1943.
The dream mantram, “Always dance,” makes me think of something which hadn’t yet happened at the time of my dream; shortly before Maria Huxley’s death, in 1955, she told a woman friend, “Always wear lipstick.” This was a remark which beautifully expressed Maria’s particular kind of courage—taking care to look your best, even when you are sick and afraid of dying, in order to spare the feelings of those who love you. “Always dance” could have a similar meaning. But it also seems to me to refer to Ramakrishna’s dancing in ecstasy. Since this is described throughout The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami could truly say that he had “found it in the scriptures.”
In the second dream, Swami’s bathrobe, with the sleeves of my bathrobe pulled down into its sleeves, seems an image of the guru’s involvement with his disciple. Hindus believe that it is risky to wear other people’s clothes or use their personal belongings. If you do, you may to some extent inherit the consequences of the former owner’s thoughts and actions. But your guru is an exception. His cast-off clothes and belongings cannot bring you anything but good.
The nuns at the Center had enthusiastically adopted this belief. They would carry off, to keep or distribute, almost anything which Swami had owned and now didn’t want. As the Vedanta Society grew, and Swami got more and more birthday and other gifts, the turnover became rapid, and devotees treasured mementos of Swami which he had barely had time to use or even touch.
* * *
Through the next two years, my diary keeping has many lapses. Here are my only diary entries about Swami in 1955:
March 2. After supper, Swami had a class in the living room. He was asked what it was like to live with an illumined soul—specifically with Brahmananda and Premananda. He answered, “What attracted me was their wonderful common sense.” Then he said how few people bothered to come and see Ramakrishna while he was alive, though most of them became ardent devotees after he was dead. I couldn’t help thinking that this applies to Swami and myself, nowadays, and I hoped he wasn’t thinking the same thing. Later, when we were alone together in his room, he talked about U.
(This was an old lady who had just died, while staying at the Center. In her youth, she had known Vivekananda and some of the other direct disciples.)
Swami recalled how terribly afraid she had been of dying. “And then, when it happened, she didn’t feel anything. How very merciful they were to her!”
June 20. On Father’s Day, Swami passed on to me a shaving brush he’d just been given but didn’t need, because he uses an electric razor. I gave him a bottle of sherry, which had to be hidden from a party of visiting Hindus, who were severely orthodox.
(Swami sometimes drank a glass or two before meals. Alcohol was approved by his doctors as a relaxant, especially in view of the prostate trouble he suffered from in later life. Swami wasn’t being hypocritical when he refrained from drinking in the presence of those who would have been shocked by it; he simply tolerated their prejudice, which he anyhow found unimportant.)
August 25. I called Swami and asked him for his blessing on my birthday tomorrow. He said, “Live many years and I’ll watch you from heaven.”
September 14. This evening I was up at the Center. Swami looked very well and happy. He said, “I get so bored with philosophy nowadays—even Shankara.” Then he told me that this morning, in the shrine room, he had been intensely aware of the presence of Swamiji and Maharaj. “If there hadn’t been anyone else there, I’d have bawled.”
He says his favorite chapter in the Gita is chapter 12, on the Yoga of Devotion. He says, “I used to want visions and ecstasies—now I don’t care. I only pray to love God. I don’t care to lecture, now. But when I start talking, I enjoy myself. I enjoy talking about God.” (I thought to myself: He’s like a young man in love.)
Swami said, “Webster came to me the other day. He said to me, ‘Swami, it’s your fault that I left the Center. You should have used your power to stop me.’ I asked him if he was meditating and making japam. He said, ‘No. You must make me do it.’ I was very touched. Such devotion!”
(On several other occasions, I had heard Swami rebuke devotees who took Webster’s attitude and asked him, so to speak, to do their praying for them. He told them that they were just lazy. So I was all the more impressed by his belief in Webster’s sincerity.)
* * *
In October 1955, Don and I left for Europe, to visit Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, and England. We got back to Los Angeles in March 1956.
In my diary, I note that “Swami, with his usual persistence, brought up the question of the Ramakrishna book again.” This means that I hadn’t kept my part of the bargain made in the Trabuco shrine room three years earlier. Now that my novel was long since published and our traveling was over for the present, I had no more excuses to offer. I knew I must start writing Ramakrishna and His Disciples at once. Wanting to do this on an auspicious day, I picked April 1. This year, it was both All Fools’ Day and Easter Sunday.
* * *
After our return from Europe, I began to see a good deal of one of the monks at the Hollywood Center. As John Yale, he had become a monastic probationer in 1950. We had met from time to time during the past six years, but not often, because of my various absences from Los Angeles and his journey to India in 1952–53, visiting the Ramakrishna monasteries there—this he later described in his book, A Yankee and the Swamis, published in 1961. By 1956, he had taken his first vows (brahmacharya) and been renamed Prema Chaitanya. (Prema means “ecstatic love of God.” Chaitanya, “awakened consciousness,” is always added to the other given name of a brahmachari of the Ramakrishna Order.)
Prema was then still in his thirties, slightly built but tough and energetic. He had dark hair and a pale handsome face which sometimes showed great inner suffering but was nevertheless youthful-looking. Before joining the Order, he had been a successful publisher in Chicago. Now he was working to build up the business of the bookshop at the Center, and doing this so efficiently that its mail-order earnings were becoming an important part of the Vedanta Society’s assets. He also helped edit our magazine, which would begin printing my Ramakrishna book, chapter by chapter, as it got written. Thus Prema and I found ourselves in constant collaboration.
I often thought that, if Prema and I had arrived at the Center at the same time and begun our monastic life together, we might have been a real support to each other. Certainly we had much in common. We had both revolted against the moral precepts of our upbringing. We both had severe standards of efficiency and were apt to be impatient of the sloppy and the slapdash. We both suffered from self-will and the rage which it engenders. He was more desperate than I, and his desperation might have taught me his courage. I was more diplomatic than he, and might have saved him from offending many people by his outspokenness.
As things turned out, however, our relationship had its frictions. The Chris whom Prema met must have been a disappointment to him. No doubt he had expected a good deal from the part-author of the Gita translation which had renewed his religious faith when he had first read it, back in the nineteen-forties. But now I had become a worldling, no longer subject to monastic discipline. My visits to Swami were like those of a Prodigal Son who returns home again and again, without the least intention of staying, and is always uncritically welcomed by a Father who scolds every other member of the family for the smallest backsliding. I know that Prema was drawn to me, as I was to him, but I must have seemed a creature of self-indulgence and self-advertisement, with the easy modesty of the sufficiently flattered and a religion which was like a hedged bet on both worlds. Prema often envied me and sometimes hated me. He confessed this with touching frankness.
* * *
April 14, 1956. With Swami, George, and Prema to a meeting at a women’s club, where Swami had to speak for twenty minutes to open a prayer-discussion group. Swami in a gray suit with a pearl-gray tie. He must always seem, at first sight, so much less “religious” than the sort of people who introduce him on these occasions; more like a doctor or even a bank manager than a minister. The stage was hung with blue velvet curtains; on one side, the flag. The audience chiefly composed of women in very small hats, many of them with folded-back veils in which tiny spangles sparkled.
June 15. This afternoon, Swami came to tea, along with George and Prema. Don was pleased because I told him that serving a meal to a swami would probably save him 500 rebirths. After they had left, he drank the remains of Swami’s tea as prasad. I think that reading my 1939–44 diary has made him much more interested in everything to do with Vedanta.
June 22. Don and I went to tea at the Center. Swa
mi said to Don, as we were leaving, “Come again—every time Chris comes.”
July 15. Swami called today, much worried because Maugham had sent him an essay on the Maharshi, and all the philosophy in it was wrong! Now we have to concoct a tactful reply.
(The Maharshi, a famous holy man, had died only a few years before this. Maugham had met him during a trip to India in 1936. I can’t remember what mistakes Maugham made in expounding the Maharshi’s philosophy. Our letter, pointing them out, must have been sufficiently tactful, for Maugham replied gratefully and made the suggested alterations in his essay “The Saint.” This was published, with four others, in Points of View, in 1959.)
October 25. This morning, I went to see Swami. He was in his most loving mood. He seemed entirely relaxed by love, as people are relaxed by a few drinks. He just beamed.
We were talking about the possible number of inhabited worlds. Swami said, “And, only think, the God who made those thousands of worlds comes to earth as a man!” Something about the way he said this—his wonder and his absolute belief, I suppose—made my skin raise goosepimples. I said, “How terrifying!” and that was exactly how I felt. It’s quite impossible to convey in words the effect made on you by a situation like this—because what matters isn’t what is said but the speaker himself, actually present before you and giving you, in some otherwise quite ordinary sentence, a glimpse of what he is.
He told me that one of his ambitions is to found a boarding school, one half for boys, the other for girls, where “they would be given the ideal”—first on the high-school level, later on the university level. He remarked that boys always seem more restless than girls. They always feel that they ought to do something or get something. Swami would tell them, “You have to be something.”
He repeated what he has so often told me, that he feels in all his work responsible to Brahmananda. When he initiates disciples, he hands them over to Brahmananda or to Holy Mother. He would like to stop giving lectures, but if he tries to shirk any duty, he finds that he loses touch with Brahmananda: “I can’t find him; then I know he is displeased.”
My Guru and His Disciple Page 18