Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  January 8. Yesterday was the Vivekananda puja and once again I read the Katha Upanishad in the shrine. Asaktananda did the worship but Swami was able to sit in on it. Don was there too. I got very moved, but it was a mixture of spiritual and theatrical emotion, as usual. Still and all, it is a great day in my year, and I did feel a momentary slight brightening in the midst of the Cloud of Unknowing.

  Asaktananda is very much in control, nowadays, and he isn’t at all shy about it; he gives orders right and left. He was impatient because breakfast wasn’t served quickly enough. Swami has now authorized him to give interviews. (Which reminds me that Larry Holt called me up in a flap a few days ago because he had read an announcement about the interviews and was afraid that this meant Asaktananda would also be allowed to initiate people. I asked Swami about this and Swami said no. But Swami would like Asaktananda to have that power as soon as he dies. Belur Math, however, decrees that only older swamis can initiate; and this would mean that some senior swami from another center would have to come to Vedanta Place and initiate a batch of devotees who were strangers to him.)

  At breakfast, Asaktananda gave Don and me a cigarette each from the pack which had been used in the shrine. So we gave them to Jim Gates and Peter Schneider, who promptly smoked them. Peter’s face is changing, from prettiness to homeliness. Don says it is the compulsive need of the Jew to be ugly. He is still as lively as ever, busy reading masterpieces for his college work. He is finding Don Quixote a terrible drag.

  On the 5th, I had quite a long talk with Swami, who seems much better. (Yesterday, after breakfast, he was sleepy because he’d slept badly the night before.) I began asking him about his life. Had it been difficult? No, he said, it had been easy—except for the material difficulties when he first came to Hollywood and they had no money: Maharaj had taken care of everything. “I made only one big mistake in my life,” he said. This was in Madras, while Maharaj was still alive. Maharaj was leaving the monastery there, to go elsewhere. He said to Swami, “I shall miss you.” He had given Swami instructions to go to various places of pilgrimage and meditate there. But Swami feels that he ought to have told Maharaj, “I’m coming with you.” He believes that Maharaj would have agreed, if only he had insisted, and that then they would have been together for the rest of Maharaj’s life—more than a year. As it was, he never saw Maharaj again. Swami also believes that, if they had been together, Maharaj would have taught him some special spiritual disciplines which had been given to him by Ramakrishna and which he had never taught anyone else.

  This conversation with Swami made me feel that I should have some sessions with him when he gets stronger, using a tape recorder, and asking him questions about his life, right from the beginning. He has agreed to this. But, of course, he would want to talk almost entirely about Maharaj. I want to find out about him. What fascinates me is the mystery of a vocation. What were the very first manifestations of it in Swami’s early life.

  Yesterday was also Jo’s birthday. She came to supper with us, bringing her daughter Betty Arizu. We got to talking about Jim Charlton, whom she saw during his last visit, and Jo told Don, quite without being prompted, how much Jim admires him, how he spoke about Don’s beauty and his great talent. I was so delighted that Jo said this, and I think it made at least some impression on Don. Jim is one of the people Don is hostile to, partly out of jealousy and partly because he feels Jim is jealous of him and bitches him. And yet he would really like to like Jim and be friends with him. Jim Gates is another of these. But, in the case of Jim Gates, I’m afraid he is right. Jim really is quite a bitch, a demure bitch. Such a pity, he would have made a charming grandson. Let’s hope he grows out of it.

  January 24. Tomorrow we leave for New York, where I’m to do interviews on T.V. and radio, to promote Kathleen and Frank. It has been a sick month. We’ve both had coughs, on and off, throughout it. And on January 14 my back was so bad I called in Neil Saker, an Israeli masseur from the gym, whom Gavin employs and recommends. Saker is very funny and quite a charmer and maybe even a first-class masseur; but he was unlucky with me, and turned the stiffness at the bottom of my spine into a really agonizing sciatica-type pain darting from my left buttock right down my left leg to the ankle. This has continued ever since. I tried treating it with acupuncture; went to a Japanese downtown, who gave me some funny little jabs all over but didn’t alter the situation. So going to New York is in the nature of a desperate shock treatment.

  Don has been such an angel as words can’t describe. But Don, as usual, demands action. He too feels that kill-or-cure New York is better than sitting here waiting for the pain to stop.

  Well, anyhow, our wills have been drawn up, by charming sad John Kerr,150 so if we’re killed on the plane Gavin will be reading this as our literary executor.

  No news of Boorman’s effort to become the director of “Frankenstein” as a feature picture. The studio still hasn’t replied to the letter he wrote [Lew] Wasserman.

  Enough for now.

  February 7. We got back here on the 4th. New York turned out to be much as I expected. So, I regret to say, did my behavior; I sulked. But there was some satisfaction in speaking out about my queerness on two T.V. shows. (“Today” and “Dick Cavett”) a radio show (Arlene Francis) and a video tape (for Arthur Bell of The Village Voice). And we saw Wystan and Vera and Anita Loos. And Don was the greatest imaginable support—except for a few hours when I managed to fray through his patience.

  My back and leg are as before, but my cough is almost gone, also a mysterious rash which broke out while we were in New York. And I feel good today because we got through most of the rewrite of the scene in “Frankenstein,” when the Creature brings the body of Agatha to the old house. We can finish the rest of it tomorrow to give to Hunt, when we go to Universal to see three of the mummy films.

  February 16. Yesterday we dashed up to the vespers of the Ramakrishna puja before going to Barbara Poe’s show at the Rex Evans Gallery. Got touched by the relics—I get priority now right after the monastics, but the difficulty is to establish Don’s right to follow me, so I don’t have to wait for him—then saw Swami, who looked wonderful, quite his old self; that morning he’d initiated Anandaprana’s daughter and someone else the morning before. He was phoning to Amiya, whose sister Joy has just tried to commit suicide, perhaps because she thinks she has cancer.151 Amiya is still up at Carmel(?) with her but is coming down on the 21st to spend a month driving everybody crazy at Vedanta Place. Swami was trying to get her to hang up. Meanwhile Don and I knelt and took the dust of his feet and he put his hand on our heads and blessed us. Then we were sat down in front of him and made to take prasad, a big fat-making slice of rich cake each, and coffee for Don and tea for me and two tangerines each to take away. This morning I weighed 150, nude.

  I forgot to say that Swami was still in the shrine when we arrived. As he left—Asaktananda was handling the relic ritual—he spoke to us all. He told how, in 1914, right after he had joined the monastery, he had been present at the Ramakrishna puja with Brahmananda, and Brahmananda had said that anybody, anywhere, who took the name of “my Thakur”152 on that day would be liberated. Swami added that he was sure this was still true, and he made us all chant Ramakrishna’s name. Later in his room he told us that this was the only occasion on which he had heard Brahmananda say “my Thakur.”

  As I was leaving the shrine after being touched by the relics, I was able to slip Jim Gates the draft-board notice (which they’d mailed to him at our house) saying that he was to be released from his service obligation next month. When that happens he’ll immediately become a monk. So this was a sort of Ramakrishna birthday present for him.

  This morning, Lenny Spigelgass called to ask me if I would help him with the Academy Award show, and, specifically, with the wording of the presentation of the special award to Charlie Chaplin. So I had to tell him the whole tale of the accusation that I peed on the Chaplins’ sofa when drunk and how, for this reason or for some other which he n
ever explained, Chaplin thereafter refused to see me.153 Lenny agreed that we had better not take any chances, lest Chaplin should make a scene when he saw me and maybe refuse the award in an outburst of senile temper. How truly astounding the workings of karma are, sometimes! I’m sorry, because I felt really honored that I had been asked.

  March 1. I forgot to record one important detail of the story Swami told in the shrine on February 15. During that puja in 1914, Brahmananda had a vision of Ramakrishna while a musician was playing the vina. So he asked [the] musician to move his instrument a little, because it was touching the robe of the figure which Brahmananda, but not the others, could see.

  There is much to record, mostly confusion about “Frankenstein.” Boorman has left and is in New York, on his way back home to Ireland. Hunt is now on his side, or says he is; Wasserman and Sheinberg haven’t seen Boorman’s film yet,154 so don’t have an opinion. And meanwhile, Warner’s is trying to buy the project away from Universal!

  The Phoenix Theatre in Leicester definitely wants to do A Meeting by the River, almost at once. They would start rehearsals on April 17 and open from May 10 to May 27. But Bob Chetwyn (who called from London to tell me all this) won’t be able to direct the play because he is tied up with BBC work. And now it seems unlikely that “Frankenstein” will take us over there that soon, if at all. So we’ll probably have to say no. It is sad, but we can’t afford to make the trip on our own. And a performance without Chetwyn and without us seems like suicide.

  Don, poor angel, has a terrible cold. It infuriates him, because he hates to think of himself as the sort of person who catches colds or other infections. Usually, he is able to say that he got it from old Dobbin, so at least Dobbin is guilty. But not this time. So Dobbin has to sleep either in the studio or in his workroom, so he won’t catch it—because that would be the last straw, having a cold yourself and having old Dub sneezing and coughing all over you.

  March 11. Despite all precautions, old Drab got a cough which has grown worse and worse. Also there are now sciatic twinges in both his legs. It’s really a bore—I long to get my health back and be able to run properly and take exercise again. I do go to the gym, but only jog round a single block and do very little else.

  Poor old Jo now has to have an operation on her foot.

  Don is going through a very bad patch with his work. Being Don, he keeps on working and doesn’t moan about it. But I know he is miserable and I can’t help.

  When we were up at Vedanta Place on the 8th, Anandaprana asked me to help them do something to discourage “the personality cult” of Swami which is getting more and more rabid and ridiculous, according to her. Young girls weep whenever they see him, and people stand around outside his room, hoping to get a glimpse. Ananda wanted me to bring up the subject during question time, after the reading. She said all this in Swami’s presence. Don, who was in the room too, told me later that he agreed with her; also that he felt Swami hadn’t liked Ananda’s attitude.

  My own feelings are very mixed. On the one hand, of course, I can understand Ananda’s point of view perfectly. Certain people have indulged in playacted devotion for Swami ever since I first came to the center and it has always nauseated me—especially when the pseudo-devotees were frumpy middle-aged women. Furthermore, Ananda is right in seeing a certain danger in the possibility that a cult of Swami might make things very difficult for Asaktananda after Swami’s death; the act might have become too difficult to follow and the Vedanta Society might therefore lose most of its membership and fall apart. This happened at the La Crescenta Center; after the death of Paramananda (or whatever his name was) the devotees refused to accept another swami from Belur Math to replace him, and so La Crescenta became a little shrinking cult group.155 (Not that I seriously believe that could happen in our case, because we already have Asaktananda firmly established as second in command.) And then again, as Don pointed out, this is supposed to be a Vedanta Society—even the cult of Ramakrishna is secondary to the impersonal philosophical teaching, at least on our brochure. For Vedanta, in the ultimate sense, negates all personality cults.

  On the other hand, I personally am a devotee of Swami first and a Vedantist second. I flatter myself that my devotion is, in the last analysis, not to Swami himself as Abanindra Nath Ghosh but as “the vessel through which Le Sacre passed,” the living proof that spiritual enlightenment is possible. I flatter myself that I can see Swami as “the vessel” and also as my adorable but quite human and fallible little Bengali friend, and keep the two separate in my own mind. I can bow down to the God which is sometimes manifest in him and yet feel perfectly at ease with him, a minute later, on an ordinary social basis. My religion is what I glimpse of Swami’s experience of religion. But I still firmly claim that it isn’t a personality cult.

  Nevertheless, it is very possible that I have encouraged others to practise a cult of Swami. It is all very easy for me, after thirty-some years, to be able to distinguish between The Guru and Abanindra Nath Ghosh, but, when I talk about Swami to others, I am nearly always talking about The Guru. Therefore I am apt to say, for example, that I believe (and I do believe it) that it is a tremendous privilege to set eyes on Swami even once and that a single meeting with him might have incalculable effects upon an individual in later life. And that’s apparently cult talk; it’s nearly certain to be misunderstood as such.

  Ananda made a reference to “the Venice Group,” with obvious hostility—and that too I can understand; from her point of view, such people are most unsuitable members of a congregation and scare away the respectable. I tend to be sentimental about “Venice” types, provided that they are cute and young and male. And I am particularly impressed by their instinctive understanding of darshan. Why shouldn’t they want to sit and gaze at Swami, I feel, especially since they know they won’t get many more opportunities of doing it? I don’t know if Ananda blames me for bringing Jim Gates and Peter Schneider into the society. I doubt if she objects to Jim but she may well have taken against Peter. He does, more and more, seem to be playacting. I say “seem” because I do believe that he sincerely wants to be initiated—though that may be partly out of his Jewish competitiveness, to catch up with Jim; it’s his methods of keeping himself in Swami’s eye which appear like clowning. He is always lurking in the shadows, after dark, when I come out of Swami’s room. Last time, when I saw who it was, I involuntarily said “Peter Quint!”156 Also, lately, he has written Swami another of his letters—the most outrageous, so far:

  You have smeared me with sandal paste

  And splashed me with water

  And laid me here on a silver plate with other flowers,

  Unfamiliar and strange.

  You didn’t just uproot me, keeping me in some of my native soil so I could be planted again.

  No; you broke my stem, so I’m separated from the earth,

  And even if my broken stem were planted again

  I would not grow, but droop and rot;

  My original fragrance (!?!) and the sandal paste’s, too,

  Would mingle with the world’s winds, leaving me

  Raging ridiculously, thinking it must have been a wishful dream to ever have been on a silver plate.

  But, why won’t you offer me?

  Have you only now seen my blemishes,

  Eaten-away bad spots, Or am I just not pretty enough?

  Or have you finished your worship now,

  Leaving a few unlucky unused flowers, having

  Picked too many?

  (I’m not surprised if you’re ashamed to put me at His feet, and I know I’m closer to Him now than before you picked me.)

  Please put me at His feet, before I wither and blacken myself with my jealous restlessness, and become

  Too ugly at last to even stay on the waiting plate.

  As a psychological exhibit, I find this enormously interesting. Even if it was written primarily as dialogue for the role Peter is playing, two things in it seem to reveal more about him than he inte
nded—the question “am I just not pretty enough?” and the phrase “jealous restlessness.”

  That reminds me of another demonstration of the personality cult which I took part in a few weeks ago, I forget which day. I had gone to Vedanta Place during the daytime when Swami was about to take one of his invalid walks; a few turns round the temple and then back to his room. So we all set out, Swami ahead, me a few paces behind, then Krishna, then about ten devotees who had been waiting around for this moment. After we’d started, Peter sidled up and got into step with me, and as we circulated he asked me if I thought he should concentrate on taking his degree at college or rather study subjects which interested him, even if they weren’t part of the required credits. . . . Thus he established himself as a specially favored cultist, practically leading the procession. And the only person who remained isolated throughout the walk was Swami himself—an onlooker would have supposed that he was just too sacred to be talked to!

  March 20. At 11 p.m. on the 16th, Ed Parone called to tell me that the Mark Taper has decided to do our Meeting by the River play. Jim is to direct it. And—wouldn’t you know—this overlaps the period of rehearsal and the opening of Jack’s Byron opera in New York! Jack got into a terrific flap about this, the other evening, and Jim told us he raved all that night and said he was leaving Jim and going off somewhere on his own, because he was being rejected by Jim and slighted by Virgil Thomson (who won’t let him publish his version of the scenario, and won’t allow him to have a queer scene with Lady Caroline Lamb). So Jim, who rather loves all this fuss, has sworn to dash back and forth between here and New York and hold Jack’s hand and be at the opera opening, even if it means missing our rehearsals!