Twelve
September 25, 1944. Swami, George, Sarada, and I drove to Montecito this morning. At present, there is nothing to report. It’s just another move. I have a dear little room with a light nicely fixed over the desk, and now all I have to do is finish Prater Violet and get together a book of selected articles from our magazine and write an introduction to it—and pray. Meanwhile, something will develop between Vernon and myself, for good or bad. No use worrying.
Amiya is girlishly happy here. She plans a family within the family—herself, Vernon, me. She’s prepared to make us comfortable, like an affectionate aunt. This is her home now. It is not my home. Perhaps no place ever will be again. There’s nothing tragic in that. To learn to be alone and at home inside myself—that’s what I’m here for.
September 26. Vernon is depressed. I asked him if he wants to leave. He said that he felt “an obligation” to me. I feel as if all our troubles are starting, just as they started before.
October 6. Vernon away in Los Angeles, seeing the dentist. I’m alone here with Amiya. Realize how fond of her I am. It’s so beautiful here. So calm and still. The grounds are three quarters wild, with thick jungly undergrowth, and a creek, and huge rocks you can climb onto and look out over the valley. At night we hear the howling of the coyotes and the quick uncanny trotting of the deer; the deer come right down through the garden, nibbling everything which isn’t fenced in. It is cold and we build huge log fires and sit talking about England and Vedanta and the members of the family. It is very snug.
October 10. Swami is up here again. Today he gave a class, and Krishnamurti came to it. He and Swami had never met before.
(Swami had always been prejudiced against Krishnamurti, because of Mrs. Besant’s publicity-making on his behalf, long ago, in India. As a youth, Swami had been outraged when she announced that Krishnamurti was an avatar. Later she used to annoy Brahmananda by trying to involve him with the Theosophical Movement. As a monk, Swami had had standing orders not to admit her to the monastery when Brahmananda was there.)
However, the meeting today was a huge success. Krishnamurti sat quietly and modestly at the back of the class. And when Swami was through, he came over and they greeted each other with the deepest respect, bowing again and again with folded palms. And then they had a long chat, becoming very gay and Indian, and laughing like schoolboys.
Some of Krishnamurti’s followers, who had sneaked in, knowing in advance that he was coming here—which we didn’t—stood eyeing us a bit suspiciously. But within fifteen minutes we had begun to fraternize. So a small but useful bridge was built.
* * *
It now became increasingly obvious that everything was going wrong between Vernon and me. My first mistake had certainly been to let him join the family so quickly. In his letters, he had made it clear that he needed time to observe life at the Center from the outside and decide whether it was the right life for him. I had agreed, and had therefore planned that we should live together on our own for a while. But when Vernon arrived and Swami immediately took control of him—as I had guessed that Swami would—I didn’t even try to prevent it; because, I suppose, that was what I really wanted. No wonder if Vernon had felt trapped.
By nature, he was a loner. It had been hard enough for him, when we had lived together before; he was only able to bear it by spending large amounts of time away from me. It was even harder for him to live in a group, although it was easy for him to charm each member individually.
No doubt, he had taken it for granted that we should now be simply brothers, in a monastic sense. What he wanted from me was disinterested helpfulness; no more than that. I was to help him get accustomed to his new life. This I was willing and eager to do. But I had other ideas of my own.
I was still strongly attracted to Vernon sexually. Therefore, I wanted to use him to neutralize my sex drive. As long as I had him with me and knew that he was getting no sex, I didn’t so much mind not getting any myself. (This dog-in-the-manger approach to chastity is perhaps not uncommon in monasteries and convents.) I also had a fantasy—too secret to be clearheadedly examined—of a sublimated love affair between us. We would be monks for each other’s sake; this would be our way of loving each other.
I believed that Vernon guessed, more or less, what it was I wanted and that it scared and repelled him. I know that he felt I was using emotional blackmail on him to make him remain with me, instead of letting him come to his own decision. That was what he had meant by referring to an “obligation.” After a few weeks, he did speak out and tell me he wished I would go back to the Hollywood Center and leave him at Montecito. I left him, but I didn’t go direct to the Center. I needed the calm of a neutral environment, so I went to visit Chris Wood in Laguna.
(Vernon left Montecito later that winter and settled down in Los Angeles to a secular life. After this, we began meeting again, as ordinary, affectionate friends.)
* * *
November 25. Am writing this in the downstairs bedroom, waiting for Chris to come and say it’s time to go swimming. The weather has been glorious all week.
As always, Chris is a refuge. His friendship has no strings attached, and, at the same time, you know you can’t lean on him. He simply offers you a place to stay and his company, if you want it, within certain hours. He respects your privacy absolutely. When you do confide in him, he never makes you feel you have given yourself away.
I expect to go back to the Hollywood Center next Monday or Tuesday, to stay for some while. I’ve got to start trying to get a movie job. I need money badly. Yesterday I finished the final polishing of Prater Violet.
There is no sense in running away from the Center at present. I’ve got to learn to live with the family without becoming involved in it. Avoid gossip. Avoid their feuds. Concentrate on what is essential—contact with Swami, and prayer. Associate with people you can really help in one way or another, and not with those whose curiosity is always offering you a basin for your tears.
November 30. Have been back at the Center for two days. Swami asked me how I was feeling and I told him a little, not much, about Vernon. This evening, in the shrine, I saw the various alternatives so clearly that they frightened me. Can I possibly face the prospect of living here indefinitely? Or of growing old messily, by myself?
Am starting to see Alfred again. An awful lot of my guilt about this is simply fear of appearances. I shouldn’t feel guilty if I weren’t living at the Center. That being true, my guilt is spurious.
Swami says that the only refuge is in God. What a terrible thought that is—and yet it’s also reassuring and absolutely obvious. Shall I ever get it properly through my head?
December 5. Down to Santa Monica to see Denny. He was very sweet and sympathetic. He suggested, as so often before, that I should come and live with him here, or that we’d go East together and he’d study at Columbia. But I can’t walk out on Swami right now. And Denny himself is so unsettled. I could never rely on him.
Swami was still up, sitting by the fire, when I got home. “You will live long,” he told me—and explained that he’d been thinking about me just as I walked in, and that the Hindus believe this is an omen of longevity. Suddenly I felt such peace. There he sits, while I roam around. After all, there is really no problem, no difficulty. Why do I tie myself in all these knots?
December 16. Just back from the beach. Denny found a sea gull with a broken wing and amputated it, which made the bird more comfortable but didn’t solve its problem. I followed it up the beach and saw how the other gulls pecked at it, and how it couldn’t fly or swim and would almost certainly starve. So I killed it. This made me feel horrible all day. I asked Swami, did I do right? And he said no, one shouldn’t interfere with the karma of any creature. This doesn’t quite convince me, however. What else could I have done? Taken the sea gull home, I suppose, and made a pet of it. But this wasn’t practical, with Dhruva around.
December 31. Sure, I ought to stop seeing Alfred or leave the Center or both. But, sooner or later—probably quite soon—Alfred will go to New York. Sooner or later, I shall get a movie job or start another book. Meanwhile, nothing prevents me from doing the one thing that’s important—make japam.
Everything else, including your scruples about your conduct, is vanity, in the last analysis. Never mind what other people think of you. Never mind what you think of yourself. Stop trying to tidy up your life. Stop making vows—you’ll only break them. No more tears, I beg. Come on, St. Augustine—amuse us. And let’s make this a happy new year.
* * *
In 1945, Vivekananda’s birthday was celebrated on January 5. (Like Easter, the Hindu holy days fall on different dates from year to year, because they are fixed in relation to phases of the moon.) On the morning of the birthday, Sister would bring coffee, bacon, and eggs on a tray into the shrine room. She would pour the coffee for Vivekananda and later she would light him a cigarette, leaving it to burn itself out in an ashtray. Meanwhile, the Katha Upanishad would be read aloud, because that had been his favorite scripture. What gave this ceremony its special feeling of intimacy and personal contact was the fact that Sister actually had served breakfast to Vivekananda in her own home, while he was visiting California at the beginning of the century.
Though my diary doesn’t say so, I think this was the year that Swami first let me read the Katha Upanishad at the breakfast ceremony. In later years, this became my only opportunity to take an active part in ritual worship at the Center, and I nearly always did the reading if I was in Los Angeles.
* * *
Early in January, a writer for Time magazine came to interview us. Time’s editors had decided to run a piece about Swami and the Vedanta Society and me, with reference to the publication of our Gita translation. Swami was delighted. I had misgivings but agreed that this would at least be a far-reaching advertisement for the Gita itself—which, in those days, was practically unknown to the American magazine-reading public, despite its many previous translations into English.
The piece appeared in the February 12 issue of Time. My misgivings were justified:
Ten years ago Christopher Isherwood was one of the most promising of younger English novelists, and a member of the radical, pacifist literary set sometimes known as “the Auden circle.” Now, thinking seriously of becoming a swami (religious teacher), he is studying in a Hindu temple in Hollywood, Calif.… Much-traveled Author Isherwood’s early novel, The Last of Mr. Norris, was a grisly, eyewitness account of British pro-Nazis in Berlin. His Journey to a War (with verse commentary by W. H. Auden) was a stark, unromanticized look at embattled China. Now this rebellious son of a British lieutenant colonel lives monastically with three other men and eight women in a small house adjoining the alabaster temple of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He shares his income and the housework with his fellow students, and daily ponders the teachings of his master, Swami Prabhavananda … Three times each day Isherwood repairs to the temple, sits cross-legged between grey-green walls on which are hung pictures of Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, other great religious teachers. The swami sits bareheaded, wearing a long, bright yellow robe that sweeps the floor. He too sits cross-legged, pulls a shawl around him, and for ten minutes meditates in silence. Then in a ringing bass he chants a Sanskrit invocation, repeats it in English, ending with the words, “Peace, Peace, Peace!” This dispassionate ceremony is the ritual of a mystical order of which slight, agreeable, cigaret-smoking Swami Prabhavananda is the Los Angeles leader …
The mistakes made by the writer—no more and no fewer than were to be expected—all became household jokes. There was the “alabaster” temple, the “small house” in which four men and eight women live “monastically,” the robe which “sweeps the floor,” the “dispassionate” ceremony (whatever that might mean) which lasts just over ten minutes, three times a day.
Swami joined in our laughter, but he was perfectly satisfied with what had been written. He didn’t take offense at the three adjectives used to describe him—“slight,” “agreeable,” “cigaret-smoking”—which I read as a condescending put-down. He found it no more than my due that the writer had featured me as the star of the Vedanta Society. The publicity didn’t repel him, it made him prouder of me. On such occasions he was truly a father.
Personally, I felt humiliated, but in a way which I couldn’t fairly blame on Time. If I had indeed been wholeheartedly dedicated to my life in religion, I would have treated this brief flare-up of notoriety with indifference—yes, even to that photograph the magazine had printed of Swami and me on the temple steps, captioned In their world, tranquillity! To be made to look ridiculous is one of the milder ordeals which any sincere believer in any unfashionable cause must face. But here was I, being introduced to the American public as an austere and devoted monk when, in fact, I was probably about to desert the Center and was already indulging in unmonastic activities during my off-hours at the beach and elsewhere.
* * *
Also included in the Time article was a statement that:
Larry, the dissatisfied young hero of Somerset Maugham’s current best-selling novel, The Razor’s Edge, whose search for faith ended in Vedanta, is said to be modeled on Isherwood.
I have no proof that anyone on the Time staff had actually started this rumor, but Time’s reference to it gave it a wide circulation and I began at once to get letters asking me if it was true. I wrote a letter for publication in Time, declaring that it wasn’t—though, of course, I couldn’t be certain of this, since novelists may be inspired by the most improbable models. Maugham soon published his own denial, however. My identification with Larry has persisted, nevertheless, through the years, and is still occasionally alluded to by gossipmongers.
I have already mentioned, in an extract from my 1943 diary, that I had written to Maugham about the exact meaning of a verse in the Katha Upanishad. This verse compares the path to enlightenment to the edge of a razor, and I had explained that the image of the razor is used to describe a path which is both very painful and very narrow. Therefore, one should not say, as many translators do, that the path is “difficult to cross.” Nothing is easier than to step across a path, or a razor, from one side to the other. What is difficult is to tread the razor’s edge, and the path to enlightenment.
For some reason, Maugham chose to ignore this bit of advice. When The Razor’s Edge was published in 1944, its epigraph read:
The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
Thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.
To Swami and me, it seemed that “pass over” is nearly if not quite as ambiguous as “cross.”
* * *
On February 21, I started work at Warner Brothers Studios. I was assigned to several films, one after another. My period of employment ran right through the summer, with only short layoffs, and didn’t end until the end of September.
This return to screenwriting was the beginning of the last phase of my stay at the Center. Up to that point, I had been a monastic, despite my backslidings. Now I became a screenwriter who happened to be living in a monastery. My daily discipline was no longer to meditate, make japam, and wash dishes, but to conform to studio hours and produce an adequate number of script pages. (Meditation on workdays became limited to the early morning; japam to odd moments between conferences with the producer and dictation to my secretary.) Certainly, my extra-monastic life was now less frivolous than before, since I was associating with fellow workers instead of playmates. But I still managed to find time for quite a lot of play.
* * *
In June 1945, Maugham came to Hollywood to stay with George Cukor and write a script for the film of The Razor’s Edge. Cukor had said he would direct it. There were meetings between Swami and Maugham and Cukor because Maugham wanted Swami to tell him exactly what spiritual instructions Shri Ganesha, the holy man in his novel, would have given to Larry. So Swami wrote them out for Maugham, as concisely as he could.
But Cukor was unable to direct the picture, after all. And Maugham’s screenplay, although completed, was not going to be used. Another director took over, with a different script, written by Lamar Trotti. However, Swami was still enthusiastic about the project and wanted to do anything he could to help it forward. He told me to write to Trotti and offer him our services as technical advisers, making it clear that we wanted no money, no official status, and no screen credit; it was to be a private relationship between him and ourselves. Trotti never answered our letter, no doubt because he feared that he might compromise himself by doing so. I, with my experience of studio politics, could understand his silence. Nevertheless, it was a pity. We might have helped him make the religious scenes less sanctimonious and more authentic than they are in the finished film.
I have an impression, rather than a memory, of a social evening at Cukor’s house to which Swami and I were invited. My impression is of Swami’s appearance and behavior in these surroundings. Some famous ladies of the screen were present, but this didn’t mean that Swami was being upstaged or neglected. They all knew who he was, what his connection was with Maugham and Cukor and therefore why he had the right to be present. They could, indeed, regard him almost as a minor colleague in show business. Swami himself seemed quite relaxed in their presence and was easily moved to giggles and rabbit-toothed smiles. The evening had a surface of perfect polish.
What, then, was odd and comic about it? Nothing—except from my own point of view. To me it seemed that these ladies were aware of something in Swami which they found mysteriously disconcerting. They themselves occupied a good deal of ego space. Admittedly, they did this with charm and skill; if their ego sheaths had been crinolines, they would never once have knocked over the furniture. Swami’s ego, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be occupying nearly enough space. Thus their distance perception was subtly distorted. They weren’t sure where they were with him. Their own egos started making experimental adjustments to the psychic gap. They became extraordinarily sincere, simple, modest. They began to overact.
But this wasn’t all of my fun. As I watched them, I remembered that, in the days when Swami was starting his life as a monk, actresses in Bengal were still being regarded as socially equivalent to prostitutes. For this very reason, whenever one of them came to visit Brahmananda for spiritual instruction, he would receive her with special graciousness and hospitality. And he taught his disciples that every woman, actress and prostitute included, was to be revered as an embodiment of the Divine Mother. Was Swami mindful of Maharaj’s teaching at this moment? And how would these ladies react if he told them about it? Quite possibly, they would be delighted and exclaim, “Why, isn’t that the cutest thing you ever heard!”
* * *
I don’t remember that Swami made any objection to my going back to film work. Perhaps he felt that, as long as I continued to sleep, most nights, under the roof of Brahmananda Cottage, there was still some hope of my suddenly deciding that I had a monastic vocation, after all.
What I actually needed at that time was either complete freedom or much stricter monastic discipline. Life at the Hollywood Center or at Montecito was so permissive and bohemian that its few rules were merely an irritation. Only monastics as dedicated as George could remain in such a situation without weakening. It wasn’t until the early nineteen-fifties that Swami began making the rules stricter—partly because, by then, the number of monastics had increased.
If such a tightening up of discipline had been introduced in 1945, I might just possibly have decided to stay on and try to make a fresh start, renouncing my film work and my outside friends. Although I was really fond of some of them, I had begun to find their tolerance humiliating. They weren’t in the least shocked by the inconsistency of my life as a demi-monk; they were amused by it. To them, it seemed “human”—that is to say, it excused them from feeling awed and rebuked by my religious beliefs.
When I ask myself, shouldn’t I have left the Center much sooner than I did, I find that I can’t say yes. It now seems to me that my humiliation and my guilt feelings were unimportant. By staying on, I was getting that much more exposure to Swami, which was all that mattered. Every day I spent near him was a day gained. And that I had lost the respect of many outside observers was, on the whole, good—or at worst it was a thousand times better than if I had fooled anybody into thinking me holy.