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Dear Patrick,

I suppose you’ll be surprised to hear from me after this long silence—almost as surprised as I should be to hear from you. We seem tacitly agreed on one point at least, that there’s no sense in exchanging letters just for the sake of chatter. I know you’re a very busy man and I shouldn’t dream of bothering you, if a situation hadn’t arisen which threatens to become awkward.

Yesterday I got a letter from Mother telling me that you’re in the United States on business and that you may be going on from there to some part (unspecified) of southern Asia. She ends by saying wouldn’t it be nice if you were able to come to India and visit me.

Of course this may be just Mother’s usual vague talk. She is utterly vague as always, says you’re in Los Angeles but doesn’t give your address there, which is why I’m sending this letter to your home address in London, to be forwarded. She doesn’t even seem to know what this business of yours is. Ordinarily I’d take it for granted that it was to do with your publishing firm, but do they publish books in Los Angeles? Didn’t you once tell me that that was all done on the East Coast? And southern Asia sounds even more unlikely. However, I’m probably out of touch with the march of progress in this as in so many other ways. I certainly have no wish to pry into your affairs.

I’m only writing because of a stupid misunderstanding which has now got to be cleared up without further delay. I admit I was responsible for it in the first place, though I must say I don’t see why I or anyone else should be expected to account for his actions to people they don’t really concern. The point is, Mother is still under the impression, and I suppose you and Penelope are too, that I’m here working for the Red Cross in Calcutta, just as I actually was working for them in Germany, up to a year ago. Well as a matter of fact I’m not. I’m in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. I mean, I am a monk here.

I won’t bore you with the whys and wherefores of all this. I doubt if they could possibly interest you. I’m well aware that my reasons for doing what I’ve done must seem hopelessly subjective and personal to anyone looking at them from the outside. In any case, reasons cease to be important as soon as a decision has been made that can’t be altered. In a little more than two months from now I shall be taking my final vows.

I simply want to ask you a favour. It’s a big one, I know. Will you tell Mother about this for me? I have let things slide so long that it has become almost impossible for me to tell her myself. From me she’d expect a lengthy explanation and that would involve me in all kinds of oversimplifications and rationalizations in order to make her understand, or imagine she understood. Whereas the very fact that you know almost nothing about the situation should make it relatively easy for you. I’m not asking you to tell any actual lies, but it would be good if you could make her feel that I haven’t done anything so very outlandish or extraordinary from your point of view, and that you know I’m all right. Assure her that I’m in perfect health, which is true, and getting enough to eat. The food here is absolutely adequate, though perhaps not by her standards. Those are the only two things she really cares about. If you can manage to reassure her somehow then she’ll soon lose interest in the whole business. You always used to be so clever at calming her down and getting her to accept accomplished facts.

Sorry to be such a nuisance.

Don’t bother to answer this.

Oliver

 

My Dear Oliver,

well, of course this is a tremendous surprise. It’s something one simply can’t react to quickly—except by saying, which I hope you take for granted, that I wish you well with all my heart in your great new change of direction. It would be impertinent of me to claim that I understand, even dimly, what made you do it. How could I? I just have to trust your judgement and believe that you’ve done what you had to do and followed your vision of the truth to its logical conclusion.

I don’t want to embarrass you, but I feel that this is the right moment to tell you I have always admired you enormously, far more than perhaps you realize. (In fact I’m willing to bet you don’t realize it at all!) When we were both boys, I must have seemed to you a very usual, cold and stand-offish sort of elder brother, part of an Establishment against which you naturally rebelled. I was probably stuffier than I shall ever be again in my life, and in a way older; when I look back on that public school persona of mine nowadays I feel positively juvenile by comparison! And, alas, I know only too well that I brought that persona with me whenever I came home. Throughout the holidays I remained a prefect, acutely conscious that you were both my junior and A Junior. If we’d been at the same school—thank God we weren’t!—I’d have had the power to order you around and even beat your backside with a cane. No doubt I asserted myself all the more because you were a good deal bigger than I was, even then. I am sure I greatly resented that, though I would never have admitted it!

I think you’ll agree that my attitude did change, after we grew up. I know I did my damnedest to make you feel that it had. If I didn’t altogether succeed, it was because I was secretly in awe of you, which made me shy and sometimes tactless. You always appeared to be so strong and self-sufficient. You made no compromises. You didn’t even seem to know there were any compromises one could make! You felt a call to do something—your friends The Friends call it a ‘concern’ if I remember rightly—and so you went straight ahead and did it. As I watched you, I couldn’t help feeling awfully corrupt and shop-soiled, because I’m so different.

But it’s really a waste of time, apologizing for the Past. Let’s look ahead! You know, there’s one great advantage that you and I have now—that it’s been such an age since we last saw each other, more than six years! So when we do meet again—if we ever do!?—we should be able to talk to each other pretty objectively. Any little frictions we may have had will have become unimportant. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I know that’s how I shall feel.

Naturally I’ll do my best to reassure Mother, as you ask me to. But, Oliver, I must say you don’t give me much to go on! I know there are aspects of your new life which I couldn’t hope to understand, and you are right not to even try to explain them to me. I do protest, though, against your assumption that I’m not interested in what you call the whys and wherefores. I am deeply interested, and on my own account quite as much as on yours.

It would help me enormously with Mother if you wouldn’t mind answering just these four questions (very crude ones, I’m afraid, but bear with me!): How did you come under the influence of your new beliefs? How long ago did it happen? (Not very long, I assume, since I know you’ve only been in India a year at the most.) You speak of taking your ‘final vows’. Will that mean that you’ll then become incommunicado? Is there any hope of our ever seeing you again in England?

If you could scribble some kind of answers on a postcard, no matter how brief, I should at least know better how to break the news. But if you prefer not to, I shall respect your silence, of course. And if I don’t hear from you I’ll cope with the situation as well as I can, relying on my (not inconsiderable) powers of invention!

And, dear Oliver, I can’t tell you how glad I am to have had at least this word from you. As you rightly say, we are neither of us very communicative. But perhaps I might add in self-excuse that Penelope and I stopped writing because we honestly felt you didn’t want to be bothered. I must remind you that you paid two or three visits to England during those years you were working over in Munich. No doubt you were on Red Cross business and pressed for time. Still, you managed to travel all the way up to Chapel Bridge and see Mother. But you never once looked us up while you were in London, or even telephoned!

Affectionately, as always,

Patrick

 

Dear Patrick,

thank you for your letter. It makes me feel I owe you an apology. I see now how cold and superior my letter must have sounded. It was insufferable of me to write to you in that tone, and at the same time burden you with telling Mother. My curtness and rudeness were due to the fact that I felt terribly embarrassed to be asking you to do this for me. When you wrote back so nicely, I was ashamed. It’s obvious that I at least owe you a proper explanation, in place of that ultimatum, and now I’ll do my best to give you one, though it won’t be easy. No, of course I didn’t really think you wouldn’t be interested! I only said that in self-defence.

The first thing I have to correct is your quite logical supposition that my decision to become a monk is something very recent, made since my arrival in India. Which would mean that it was an impulsive, not to say hysterical act, prompted no doubt by the influence of the Mysterious Orient! Anyone who knows Hindu religious life will be able to assure you that I couldn’t conceivably be taking my final vows within a year of becoming a monk, at least not in any reputable monastic order. But how could you be expected to know that?

No, this isn’t a recent decision, or an impulsive one. The whole thing started long ago. In fact, it had already started when I last saw you all in England in 1958. If you remember, I’d been offered the German job through the International Red Cross in Geneva, and I’d flown on from there to interview the people in the Munich office about it and had then decided to take it.

It was while I was in Munich that first time that I got to know a Hindu monk who’d been living there for some years. He’d formed a small group who used to meet with him several times a week to practise meditation and study Vedanta philosophy. I ran across this monk quite by accident—as it then seemed to me, anyway—in a public library, and we began talking. Something about him fascinated me, from the first moment; it was his very quiet unemphatic air of assurance. What I mean is, nearly all the other people who had ever struck me as having great assurance were also self-assertive and complacent, in fact downright stupid. So I felt I was meeting a new sort of human being, almost. He wasn’t at all impressive physically. He was small and frail and skinny, with untidy grey hair cut rather short, and he can’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. He was in his middle fifties but looked older, except that his eyes were young, very clear and bright.

He had, as I say, this extraordinary calm assurance, without being in the least aggressive. It was I who was aggressive—as you may well imagine, knowing me! When I found out in a general way what he believed, I told him without making any bones about it my opinion of people who try to save their own souls while neglecting the ills of their neighbours’ bodies. That was how I saw the human situation then, and it seemed awfully simple to me. You only had to choose between social service and private selfishness. The very idea of mysticism set my teeth on edge—I was even privately critical of the Quakers because they wasted valuable work-time on their silent periods—and Hindu mysticism seemed the last straw!

I can see clearly now, looking back, that my attitude was too simplified to be absolutely sincere and that I wasn’t nearly as sure of it as I imagined I was. If you do the kind of work I’d been doing, you keep getting your nose rubbed in the fact that for millions of people in many parts of the world life is basically hell. Sometimes the sheer horror of this blots out everything else, and your efforts to do something about it seem futile and idiotic and almost indecent, a form of self-indulgence. What’s the use of it all, you think. Aren’t I merely using these wretched people to salve my own conscience? I had been through quite a few of these bouts of desperation myself, but I had always got over them by working extra hard and then tried to forget them altogether.

So perhaps I was actually less unwilling than I realized to be receptive to this strange little man. Anyhow, as we went on talking, he somehow made me start questioning the very thing I thought I was most certain about, my work and why it was worthwhile. I began defending it even though he wasn’t attacking it, and whenever I found I couldn’t make my defence hold water I looked at him in dismay and he smiled!

I don’t mean, of course, that all this happened the first time we met. It’s impossible for me now to remember our conversations separately, because they were really all parts of the same conversation, which kept being dropped and picked up again and wandering backwards and forwards and repeating itself in different words. Also, as far as I was concerned, it was more than a mere conversation. It was a confrontation with this individual who, just by being what he was, intrigued and mystified me and undermined my basic assumptions as no one else had ever done before.

We talked, that first day, until the library closed, and then he asked me to come and see him next morning and I did, and after that we spent several hours together every day until I absolutely had to cut my stay in Munich short—the Red Cross people were getting impatient, I’d already been there two weeks longer than was planned—and hurry over to England to settle things up so I could return to Germany and start work.

You’re probably beginning to understand why, when we were together in London, I didn’t tell any of you anything about the Swami. (That was what we used to call him in our group, it’s the usual title of a Hindu monk who has taken the final vows, just as you say Father to a Catholic priest. The Swami had a Sanskrit name, as they all do, but if I were to use it here I know it would only make him sound that much stranger and more foreign to you, which is exactly what I want to avoid.)

I was still greatly disturbed by my meeting with the Swami, and correspondingly defensive. I still wasn’t at all sure what I really thought of him and his attitude to life, or how I was going to react to it. So the mere idea of describing him to anyone else embarrassed me to the point of panic. I was afraid of being laughed at, of course—most of all by Penelope, because in those days she was quite a devotee of Vedanta philosophy, not to mention Zen Buddhism and Meister Eckhart. (Is she still, I wonder?) There was a time when she used to get very indignant with me because of my lack of enthusiasm for such matters. She once told me I was a hopelessly intolerant arrogant materialist!

So I returned to Munich without revealing my secret and started in at the Red Cross job, and I wrote and told Mother how interesting the work was, which was true or at any rate only a half-lie. It would have fascinated me under ordinary circumstances, that’s to say if I hadn’t met the Swami. As it was, I often got the feeling that it was almost meaningless, because this other part of my life seemed so much more real. I loathe the way people use that word ‘real’, especially in religious circles, but here I mean it literally. During the hours when I was at the Red Cross headquarters everything seemed a bit dreamlike. Whereas when I got back to the Swami’s room and sat down quietly with him—he often sat a long time without talking, which was disconcerting at first, but I got used to it—it was like coming out of a daze and asking myself, ‘Where was I, all day long?’ and then answering, ‘I don’t know exactly, but this is where I am when I’m awake.’

A few weeks after I got back to Munich, I moved in with the Swami. Before that, he had been living alone, which wasn’t good at all because he had no idea of looking after himself. The members of his group were really devoted to him and they did their best, but they were all poor and they had to work hard to make a living. If they invited him to meals or brought him food, he would eat, otherwise he was apt to forget to do it. He had a quite nice though extremely small flat, but there was very little money left over when the rent had been paid. He was absolutely dependent on what we could afford to give him and he always refused to take anything more than was barely necessary. To make matters worse, his stomach was delicate and his heart wasn’t functioning properly, in fact he had a poor constitution altogether. ‘I have a Bengali body,’ he used to say, ‘not good for much!’ He was astonishingly cheerful about it. And I never felt he was just keeping a stiff upper lip. He actually did seem to find his inefficient body, and the predicament of being obliged to live inside it, funny!

So I began cooking proper meals for him and doing the various jobs that needed to be done. It seemed odd to me at first, being in this relationship to an older man—partly, I suppose, because Father died when we were both so young, partly because I’d never lived with only one other person before, but always in institutions and communities, or by myself. The Swami took it quite for granted, however. And soon he began referring to me as his ‘disciple’. To begin with, this was more or less said as a joke, but then I realized that it was what he had been hoping for, ever since he had come to Europe from his monastery in India—a disciple in the literal Hindu monastic sense, a novice monk who serves his guru and is trained by him like a son, and who will become a swami himself in due course. I was the first eligible candidate to appear. The other members of our group were all elderly or married or both, so they couldn’t have become monastics even if they had been ready to.

When I realized what the Swami wanted, I was embarrassed and disconcerted and a bit scared. I think if he had tried to rush me I might even have run out on him. But he didn’t, quite the reverse. In fact, he behaved as though the whole decision were beyond his control and mine. ‘If the Lord wills,’ he was fond of saying. That kind of talk used to disgust me and indeed it still does, when lazy people use it to excuse their laziness. But I had already discovered that the Swami meant it. It was the way he lived. So I started saying to myself, ‘Well, let’s wait and see if the Lord does will it,’ and I stopped resisting the idea or even trying to make myself like it. This was all the easier for me because there I was, living with the Swami anyway, as an unofficial disciple. To take the first monastic vows would simply be making my status official, it wouldn’t mean any immediate drastic change, because the Swami fully approved of my going on working for the Red Cross, for the time being. (He was definitely not opposed to social work or to any other kind of constructive activity in the world. That’s an idea which is always being spread around about the Hindus, that they disdain activity and withdraw from it, and it’s a complete libel. They absolutely agree that the world’s work has to be done. Only they point out that the attitude of the worker toward the work is all-important, and that, in the cultures of the West, this attitude is usually distorted. But I’d better not get started on this subject. I’m supposed to be writing a letter, not a lecture!)

In 1961, the Swami said I could take the first monastic vows—they are called brahmacharya—and I decided to take them. You’ll agree that this was hardly a sudden decision, on either side. I had been with him the best part of three years. It’s true that this is less than the normal period of probation, which is five, but I suppose he thought he could take the risk of cutting it short, since he had me where he could keep his eye on me, all the time!

The vows themselves are pretty much the same in spirit as the Christian ones—continence in thought, word and deed—only they aren’t so much vows as resolves. I mean, they aren’t some kind of trap which you get yourself into, like marriage. No offence! But you know what I mean, marriage as an inhibition which automatically makes possible the concept of adultery.

Even if you do understand why I kept quiet about the Swami to begin with, it may still seem strange to you that I didn’t tell you all later. I suppose it is strange, looked at from the outside. I think I wanted to be absolutely sure that I really had committed myself, before I said anything. After all, one may take brahmacharya and still change one’s mind about becoming a full-fledged monk. Does that sound very weak and insecure of me? Perhaps it does. But oughtn’t one to feel insecure about something as important as this?

Of course I should have realized that you and Penelope would feel cold-shouldered, when I came to England and saw Mother but didn’t look you up. Well, why didn’t I? The explanation might be, I suppose, that I feared that X-ray eye of yours! It’s never much of a problem to sidestep Mother’s curiosity, provided you tell her something. But I couldn’t have fooled you by rattling on about my work, and the beauties of Munich and the mountains! One glance at me, and you’d have seen instantly that something mysterious was going on under the surface!

Anyhow, the time kept slipping by and I kept putting off telling you, and then about eighteen months ago the Swami started to get seriously ill. The doctor told us he had four or five things wrong with him—the liver and the kidneys and his heart and blood pressure—he couldn’t be expected to last long. The Swami knew this and he took it very calmly. He didn’t seem to have any particular regrets about the work in Munich, it was the Lord’s will that it was coming to an end. But he did say several times that he was sorry he couldn’t return to his monastery in India and be cremated there beside the Ganges. Also, he wished he could have been present when I took sannyas, the final monastic vows. In our Order, it’s a rule that sannyas is only given here at the Head Monastery of the Order. I couldn’t have taken sannyas without coming to India, even if the Swami had still been alive.

He died in his sleep one afternoon, quite without warning. The doctor had said there was no immediate cause for alarm, and I had gone out to work as usual. That was on October 11th, 1963. When I notified them in India, the Head of the Monastery wrote and suggested I should come out to them anyhow. Then I could bring the Swami’s ashes with me, to be committed to the Ganges. And I could live at the Monastery, and we could all get to know each other, and eventually I could take sannyas. The Swami had evidently told them a lot about me already in his letters, so they were more or less prepared to accept me, sight unseen.

After a few doubts and deliberations, I came to the conclusion that this was the right thing for me to do. So I wound up the Swami’s affairs, such as they were, and bought a plane ticket out of the money I’d saved from my Red Cross salary, and here I am.

Just before I took off I sent Mother a cable, saying simply that I was leaving for India. As you may imagine, I was less than ever in the mood for explanations at that particular moment, and, as it turned out, I didn’t have to tell her any lies. She took it for granted that I was being sent by the Red Cross to work there. My address here hasn’t betrayed me, because, as you’ve seen for yourself, it’s just a P.O. box at a local post office at which the Monastery picks up its mail. By keeping my correspondence with Mother down to occasional postcards, on which I’ve commented on her news without giving any of my own, I think I’ve avoided arousing her suspicions.

But I’m truly thankful that this period of deceiving you all is over! It was a silly, petty business and I’m not proud of it. I hope this letter has given you enough background material to use on Mother. Just let me recapitulate the main points—

I am well. I am being properly fed. I shall take sannyas soon—toward the end of next month, on January 25th actually—with about twenty of my brother monks. My decision to become a monk is of long standing, made after careful deliberation and absolutely final.

I am not and shall never be held incommunicado, as you suggest. This Monastery is not run by Trappists! You ask if I shall ever come to England again. That’s a question I can’t answer definitely at present. During the next few weeks, that’s to say until after I take sannyas, I must deliberately avoid thinking about the future, because it is irrelevant. And when I become a swami of the Order I shall naturally be subject to the decisions of my seniors. Still, I suppose it’s on the cards that they might want me to go back to Europe in one capacity or another. So there’s no harm in your telling Mother that such a thing is quite possible.

You don’t say whether or not Penelope is in Los Angeles with you. No doubt she’ll be astonished when she hears what I’ve done, and amused too. Well, she’s entitled to her laugh. Considering my former opinions and behaviour, the joke is certainly on me!

Hoping you are both of you well and happy, and the Children too.

Oliver

 

My dear old Olly,

your letter in answer to mine arrived this morning, and I’ve reread it at least a dozen times already, it fills me with such happiness and relief. Yes, that first letter did sound a little bit like an ultimatum, as you say! But this one sounds like the Olly I used to know, which reassures me enormously. It was so generous of you to take the time and trouble to write me this long intimate account of your conversion (should one call it that?) and of this truly remarkable swami of yours. The picture is getting much clearer to me now, though of course I still have many questions I long to ask you.

I’ve already been on the phone to Penny (no, she isn’t with me here) and to Mother. Long-distance between Los Angeles and London is perfect, these days, you might as well be talking in the same room, so while I’m out here I always have the feeling I can conjure up Penny at any moment. But the telephone link between London and Chapel Bridge had something very wrong with it when I put through the call to Mother—it sounded like an antique wireless set in a thunderstorm, and I couldn’t get them to get me a better line. So, when Mother answered, I only managed to convey to her that I’d heard from you and that you were still in India and in splendid health and very very busy, and that you’d asked me to call and tell her you were thinking of her and give her your love. That was as much as I could get across, in the midst of all the screaming and whistling and growling static. I’m sorry. But I was afraid, if I yelled ‘Oliver’s a monk!’ she’d have understood it as ‘Oliver’s a drunk!’ or something equally misleading and unhelpful. However, I’ll get a long letter off to her today, I promise, and I’ll try to bring out clearly all the points you want emphasized.

You were wrong about Penelope. She didn’t laugh—though I wouldn’t swear she wasn’t a tiny bit amused, as she is by all of us, most of the time, in her own subtle way. Furthermore, she claimed that the news didn’t surprise her in the least. Either she knows you a lot better than I do—from a different angle, bien entendu—or else she was showing off her feminine intuition! She sends you her love and says she hopes you’ll return to England in due course and instruct her in The Way. She also asks if there’s a Hindu order of nuns into which she may aspire to be received, because she wants to renounce the world as soon as the children have grown up. I accused her of simply wanting to renounce me, but this she denied hotly!

In your first letter you quite correctly surmised that the business of book publishing doesn’t exactly thrive in Los Angeles. I might have ventured to construe this as a hint of curiosity about what I am up to here, if you hadn’t immediately added that you didn’t wish to pry into my affairs—meaning, I took it, that you couldn’t care less! This silenced me for the time being. But now the tone of your second letter encourages me to be bolder, so I’ll tell you what I’m doing in Los Angeles, anyway. I have a very good reason for wanting to tell you, which will appear in a moment.

I don’t know just how well Mother has kept you informed of my doings, in her letters. I doubt anyhow if she herself realizes the extent to which I’ve been earning the reputation of an enfant terrible with our firm. Some years ago, I think while you were still away in Africa, I had my first minor scandal, over the memoirs of a certain Anita Hayden. (You wouldn’t have heard of her, but she was one of the leading British musical comedy and film stars of the thirties.) Her memoirs were pretty hot stuff as well as skating thinly over libel, and I, as a very junior partner, had to use all my arts of persuasion to get Uncle Fred and dear old G.B.V. to touch them with a barge-pole. G.B.V. said, referring to Anita, ‘give me a good honest Piccadilly tart, any day of the week!’ He asked me if I wanted to bring disgrace on a firm whose list had been adorned by the names of some of the noblest (and least-read) Edwardians. However, persuasion won the day, the memoirs were published and they made us such a shamefully large sum of money that the matter was never mentioned again. But that was only the first of my various ventures into vulgarity. I’ve made some miscalculations of course, not all dirt is pay-dirt. But on the whole I’ve been so outrageously lucky, up to now, that my elders and betters have become a little superstitious about my luck, in spite of themselves. They warn me tearfully against going too far, they almost wish I’d come a cropper even though they’d have to pay for it, and yet they daren’t actually say No to any book I recommend!

Well, this time I have gambled far more drastically than ever before—got myself involved in making a movie! It’s to be based on a novel we published before the War—a morally spotless story, I may add, which sold less than five thousand copies. Then, twenty years later, some American writer rediscovered it and recommended it to the film studio he was working for in Hollywood. The studio was interested and got in touch with us about the rights, but lost interest again when they couldn’t put together what’s called a package-deal. (Forgive me for parading my newly acquired show-biz jargon!) It was at this point that I suddenly became reckless. I canvassed the few people I know who are connected with the films here and finally found two who were ready and able to put a new deal together. They asked me if I wanted to run the show. I said I certainly did. The experience of masquerading as a movie-producer is too much fun to be missed! As for Uncle Fred and G.B.V., they prophesy my ruin and stipulate that not one penny of the firm’s money shall be risked—to which I gladly agreed, because we don’t need it. However, each has come to me behind the other’s back and asked if he might make a small investment in the film out of his own pocket! Which will show you to what an extent I’ve already corrupted them. I sometimes feel slightly satanic.

Well, now you know why I’m here in Los Angeles—to talk the project over in all its aspects with our American opposite numbers, and then come to a final decision. Now at last I really think we’ve reached one. We’re going ahead with it. During these long weeks of negotiations I have felt severely inhibited because I’ve had to school myself in discretion, and I was so excited about the whole thing I longed to tell everybody I met. But, until the contracts have actually been signed, we just might possibly have trouble from competitors, if the news leaked out. That, no doubt, is why I’ve been somewhat evasive in my letters to Mother, even—so please don’t be so hard on her, poor darling, for her vagueness!

I notice one phrase in your description of the first meeting with your Swami which seems to suggest that you now believe there is no such thing as accident in life—am I right? Well, here’s another most dramatic proof of that belief! You see, this projected film of ours (it’s to be very spectacular indeed) will have to be shot almost entirely in Malaya and Thailand. As soon as the deal is concluded, I’m planning to fly to Singapore and join our director on a tour of the proposed film locations. And there you are in your Monastery outside Calcutta which, the B.O.A.C. people here tell me, is only four hours’ flying time from Singapore, the merest hop, when one’s come halfway round the world already! This move of yours, which was apparently taking our paths about as far apart as possible, was actually bringing them closer together again.

You tell me Mother wrote to you hoping I might visit you in India, but I note that you make absolutely no comment on this suggestion, in either of your letters. Is this to be taken as a warning that you wish to be left alone? Probably it is, and probably I should take that warning, but I’m an indecently persistent creature. I don’t believe in giving anything up without at least asking for it. So here goes!

Now please be completely frank with me, Oliver, because the very last thing I want is to embarrass or annoy you. My proposal is simply this—couldn’t I break my journey in Calcutta on my way to Singapore and stay a few days somewhere near your Monastery, in some inn or hostel? Never mind how dirty or uncomfortable it might be, I’m quite prepared to rough it. I know, of course, that you’ll be busy most of the time, especially now that you have this solemn ceremony of sannyas ahead of you. I would most carefully avoid getting underfoot. Believe me, that’s one lesson I have learned from that unfortunate visit to you in Africa! I remember with shame how tiresome I must have been, bothering you with questions while you were up to your ears in work with the Quakers. You were so courteous, doing your best to entertain me in your few spare moments, but I must admit I came away feeling that I was the most useless of onlookers and that the best I could do to show my respect for the dedicated lives you were all leading and the help you were giving to those poor sick villagers was to take myself off to the nearest luxury hotel, which was where I belonged!

Even if I could see you for half an hour a day, the visit would be well worth while, from my point of view. I’m sure it would do me good, just to be within the ambience of your Monastery and breathe in its atmosphere.

Besides, there’s Mother. She’s so hungry for real news of you. I don’t, for Heaven’s sake, mean this as any kind of reproach! But if I can tell her that I’ve actually seen you, and that you’re not only well and well-fed (that isn’t all she cares about, Oliver, and you know it isn’t!) but also happy in your new life, that will support her and keep her going for a long long time. Do you altogether realize how much you mean to her? I can say this now without any resentment. I quite frankly admit to you that for many years I was hurt and resentful, because I knew that I meant very little to her indeed. She lives for you. And therefore only you have the power to hurt her, which I know of course you’d never dream of doing, intentionally. She’s such a spartan person that it’s only too easy to assume that she’s self-sufficient and impervious, oh, but she isn’t, Olly, she most certainly isn’t! She minds things terribly. I’ve seen her minding and not been able to raise a finger to help, or even let her know that I knew.

Perhaps I have no right to talk to you like this, any more? After all, I have no idea what system of values you may have adopted, along with your new philosophy. I’ve been talking to you as a brother, but it may well be that in becoming a monk you’ve renounced all such ties. If so, forgive me for presuming. I’ll only venture to tell you this—you may renounce your family, but we firmly refuse to renounce you!

As for my coming to see you, that’s something only you can decide. I promise you, I’ll never question your decision. I’ll respect it, knowing it will be made by your conscience only, not your emotions. However, I must ask you, please don’t just ignore this request. Let me have a word, at least. You don’t have to explain, if you’d rather not. Simply write Yes or No.

If the word is Yes, and of course I desperately hope it will be, then there’ll be time to discuss details such as accommodation, your own schedule, what rules I must observe during my stay, what kind of clothes will be suitable for me to wear, and so forth. Also, is there anything I can bring you? Books, for instance? And don’t I seem to remember that you used to have a weakness for that dark butterscotch which comes wrapped in silver foil (Callard and Bowser)? I notice they stock it in the markets here, too. Or are all such luxuries renounced or forbidden? I certainly don’t want to be responsible for a new temptation of St Antony!

Olly, I must say this in conclusion—you can’t know how happy and honoured I feel that you chose to confide in me as you have. Even if our relationship as brothers no longer means anything to you, I feel you have brought us close together again as human beings, perhaps closer than we’ve ever been before. I won’t harp on this theme because I know how you hate sentiment. I’m afraid I am a shameless sentimentalist, and getting more of one as I get older. (Thirty-eight next birthday, in case you’ve lost count!) So please make allowances for me. And remember me in your prayers. I need them. I really mean this.

With my deep affection, brother or no brother,

Paddy

 

Patrick’s first letter fooled me completely to begin with, because it worked on my guilty conscience. I was ashamed of my silly childish secretiveness. I wanted him to tell me he understood perfectly what made me behave like that, and then assume the responsibility for putting everything right again, like a true Elder Brother. So I accepted what he wrote at its face value and believed what I wanted to believe.

But this second letter shows the first one up. It’s obvious to me now that he was just playing with me, as he always used to. He hasn’t changed a bit. And why should he have changed, why should I have expected it? You don’t change unless you want to, and it’s clear that nothing has happened to make him the least dissatisfied with himself as he is. All the same, quite unreasonably, I can’t help feeling furious with him. Furious because I’m humiliated, humiliated because I told him far too much about Swami. I could have explained everything that needed to be explained without going into those things which were strictly between Swami and me. But is that Patrick’s fault? Did he ask me to tell him? He didn’t even know then that Swami existed.

He’s still playing all his old tricks, including that blackmailing sobstuff about Mother. Not that that in itself makes me angry any more, he’s so obviously just trying to get a rise out of me. For him, teasing is its own reward. Actually, Mother can’t possibly care much about me now. She must be forgetting me already, which is as it should be and as I want it to be. She only needs to keep being reassured that I’m all right, so she can comfortably dismiss me from her mind for longer and longer periods. That’s what old ladies are like, and why be sentimental and lie about it? If Mother really cares for anything now I’m sure it’s her cats and her grandchildren, in that order.

Even if I could see you for half an hour a day, Patrick says! If he was so desperate to see me, why didn’t he ever come over to see me in Munich? No, Brother Patrick is inquisitive, that’s all. The idea of this Monastery intrigues him. He’d enjoy coming here and spying around a bit, that’s his only motive.

(At this point, I suddenly stopped. I felt, with a strange kind of panic, that I mustn’t write another word. At first this feeling seemed justified and right and proper. I took it for the voice of conscience. I said to myself, keeping this diary has helped me so much, through the months I’ve been out here. It has got me over all kinds of negative moods and aversions. But never before today have I used it as an outlet for personal resentment. Isn’t this terribly wrong and dangerous? But then it gradually dawned on me why it really was that I was afraid to go on writing. When I wrote that I was humiliated because I’d told Patrick too much about Swami, that wasn’t getting down to the truth. The truth is that I’m unspeakably humiliated and shocked to discover that I, who am supposed to be spiritually advanced to the level at which I can take sannyas, still feel these primitive spasms of sheer hatred toward my own brother! That stabs my ego in the very heart of its vanity. It was already beginning to pose in its swami’s robes and admire itself as a budding saint. Now it gets a glimpse of its unchanged unregenerate vicious monkey-face, and it’s shocked. It goes into a panic. It tries desperately not to look.

When shall I get it through my head, once and for all, that the ego, the Oliver in me, never will and never can be anything but a vain little monkey? I ought to have learned by this time, after all Swami’s teaching and training, to live with this monkey and refuse resolutely to be impressed or shocked by its postures and greeds and rages. Its whole effort is directed toward making me identify myself with it, when I know perfectly well that I ought to be continually dissociating myself from it, calmly and firmly and with complete good humour—if you get angry with it, you identify automatically. That’s what self-discipline means. The monkey must be made to face its ugliness again and again. That’s why I should keep on with this diary and even write it in more detail than usual throughout these next weeks, being as frank as I can. It’s absolutely necessary to bring everything out into the open at last, in the little time I have left before sannyas.)

I haven’t let myself realize until now—and at least I’m thankful that I have realized it, even so late—what a terrific problem Patrick still is for me. This is something I have got to cope with, not ignore and avoid any longer. He must come here. There’s no getting out of that. I even want him to come.

There was a lie, or at least an evasion, in what I wrote to Patrick. It wasn’t because of him that I didn’t visit them in England, it was because of Penny. I was afraid to see her then. I didn’t trust myself.

And what about nowadays? Suppose Patrick had wanted to bring her here? How would I have felt? I can’t possibly tell—because I haven’t the smallest idea what Penny is like now. She may have changed so much that it wouldn’t mean anything at all if we did meet. That marvellous understanding we used to have together might simply not be there.

Which makes me wonder, how much of our understanding was just in my imagination? What sort of person was she really? Right up to the last moment I refused to believe she would actually go through with it and marry Patrick. Doesn’t that in itself prove I didn’t really know her? And anyhow, she surely must have changed, after living all these years with him.

All right, perhaps I am still a bit in love with her. Perhaps I’m rationalizing my jealousy of Patrick by saying he’s unworthy of her. Perhaps it’s even true that I fell for Penny in the first place partly because she was engaged to Patrick. None of that really matters. It’s just psychology, and psychology is merely a sophisticated parlour-game unless you indulge yourself by playing it and giving it the power of truth. I have vowed not to play the game—that’s the whole meaning of my life here. In Patrick’s world, everybody plays it, and so the precious ego is flattered and cultivated and fattened by being told about its remarkable sicknesses. In our world, the ego is methodically starved to death.

Patrick must come here, and I must face him and our relationship. I must accept him with all his arts and tricks, all the good, all the bad, everything. What’s the use of me, if I can’t pass this test? What kind of a swami am I going to be?

Enough of this for now. Now write to Patrick. Tell him he can come.

No, better send him a cable. Let’s get the machinery started, irrevocably, as soon as possible.