My Guru & His Disciple (15 page)

July 7. Out for a turn around the block before vespers, I met Rich. He looked a real bum, dirty, unshaven, and slier than ever. He has quit his job at the theater and is going around mowing lawns. He refused supper because, as he said, he can't eat here without going into the shrine room first, and he won't go into the shrine room because he has “broken” with Ramakrishna. His scruples are part of his fascination.

Swami returned on July 14, bringing with him Swami Vishwananda, the head of the Vedanta Center in Chicago.

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Vishwananda is fat, jolly, very Indian. He nearly chokes with laughter at his own jokes, and talks Bengali with Swami and Asit. Everything delights him here, especially the food; in Chicago he can't get proper curry. His Indianness makes Swami seem more Indian, too.

Vishwananda is staying in our house, thus producing a new crisis of overcrowding, especially as he has to have the big bedroom all to himself; this fills me with jealous possessive jitters. However, these I must overcome once and for all, just as I would have had to overcome them in a forestry camp. Isn't it perhaps because I'm not in camp that this problem arises at this particular time? Do we ever avoid anything?

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July 16. I've just been talking to Swami. I feel such a deep relationship with him. “Love” is too possessive a word to describe it. It's really absence of demand, lack of strain, entire reassurance. I can't imagine being jealous when he seems to favor one person, because it's so obvious that his attitude toward each one of us is special, and “to divide is not to take away.”

He touched my cheek with his finger and giggled, because The New Republic had referred to me as a “prominent young writer.” I told him how free I've been from sexual thoughts and fantasies during the past weeks, and he said, “Yes, I saw that in your face yesterday, but don't get too confident, they will come back.”

Vishwananda came into “my” washroom this morning, spilled water on the floor, and left a brownish gob of spittle in the basin. This is just the sort of thing I've got to take, and like.

Later. Vishwananda got hold of me and put me through a regular examination, making me show him the mudras we use in the ritual. Then I had to talk on the telephone to Joan, one of the M-G-M secretaries, who had called up out of the blue to gossip. When we were through, I rushed into the shrine room, prostrated, rushed out again, had lunch, slept till four, hurried down to the boulevard with Swami's watch to be repaired and a letter to Willie Maugham about the exact translation of a verse in the Katha Upanishad from which he wants to take a title for his new novel—The Razor's Edge or The Edge of the Razor—nearly lost Dhruva in the crowd, got home, sawed some wood, joined in a discussion as to whether or not Richard should forget about the Marine Corps and try to get classified as a conscientious objector, had tea, translated a verse of the Gita, ate too many peppermint drops, and am now late for vespers. This is what they call an escape from the world!

July 19. This weekend has been stormy, unexpectedly so. We had a puja and there's nothing like a good puja for stirring up lust. As we sat there in the shrine room, it came to me with the fullest force how much I should like to give up Vedanta, pacifism, everything. Yes, get into a uniform and be the same as everybody else. I really wouldn't care what happened to me, I thought, provided I could spend a few more rousing Saturday nights.

Suppose Swami's just kidding himself? Suppose there's no God, no afterlife? Well—suppose. Then death is best, at once. But if you don't want to die? Could you be satisfied with a life of cautious, rationed sensuality? I don't think you could. You've got to renounce or destroy yourself. So the minimum Buddhist position still stands—wrote he, taking another peppermint.

There is no point even in writing this down, however. In a stormy sea there's no point in doing anything but continuing to swim. Keep going through the motions—nothing more. This will pass.

July 22. What I didn't mention in my last entry was that much of my tension was concerned with a copy of the rules and regulations of the Belur Math, which has just arrived. Back at headquarters in Calcutta, they seem to be getting worried about the easygoing way the American centers are run. They want us to shape up and become strictly Hindu monastics.

My God, I thought, when I heard this, what is this gang I've joined? Is it to be turbans unwinding uphill all the way, to the very end? Swami answered my fears and doubts by asking me to write a letter to the Math for him, explaining that their Indian rules couldn't possibly apply to the American centers. “If they refuse to give way,” he said, “I shall leave the Order!” What a little rock of safety he is!

(Belur Math did give way temporarily, but it continued to exert pressure to achieve its objectives, gently and with truly Oriental patience, throughout the years that followed.)

July 23. We are in the midst of a heat wave. I spend all the meditation hours rattling through my japam, so as not to be bothered with it at any other time. At present, I have no feeling for the sacredness of the shrine. If you ask me what I want, I reply: Sex, followed by a long long sleep. If offered a painless drug which would kill me in my sleep, I would seriously consider taking it; and I've never played much with thoughts of suicide before.

I inhabit a world in which people are scarcely real. Real are my sex fantasies and sex memories. Real are the devices I think up for not being woken prematurely by somebody's alarm clock. Utterly utterly unreal are Ramakrishna, religion, the war with all its casualties and suffering, and the problems of other people. I long to get away from this place. And yet, if I do manage to wriggle out somehow, I know that, in two or three months, I'll pine to get back in again.

July 26. Today has been a relatively good day. I got up early, went into the shrine at six, and then cycled down to the printers' before breakfast to take them the copy for the leaflet announcing Vishwananda's lectures. This morning I roughed out another page of Prater Violet, did three verses of the Gita and my 2,500 beads.

July 28. Salka Viertel brought Garbo up to lunch at the Center. The girls were all a-flutter and Garbo didn't disappoint them. She played up to them outrageously, sighing how wonderful it must be to be a nun and implying that all her fame was dust and ashes in comparison. Then she flirted with Swami, telling him how dark and mysterious his Indian eyes were. Sarada, of course, is convinced that Garbo's soul is halfway saved already. Swami says that now I am to bring him the Duke of Windsor, his other object of worldly admiration.

(Swami was a regular moviegoer in those days, so his admiration for Garbo wasn't to be wondered at. The Duke of Windsor was another matter. I could only suppose that Swami still pictured him as the young Prince of Wales, visiting India in the early nineteen-twenties. Since most Indians must have been expecting that the Prince would be just another embodiment of British imperial tyranny, his unassuming boyish charm must have come as a great surprise to them and been therefore all the more powerful and winning.)

August 6. I must just write a few lines in recognition of this important date: six months at the Center, six months of technical celibacy. Last year, that achievement would have seemed positively supernatural. Now I see it as the very first step, merely: less than the first. It has no value except as a reassurance that nothing is impossible.

Today, Swami Vishwananda started to teach us a chant: Ram, Ram, Ram, Jaya, Ram. It sounds so idiotic—just like the fake-Tibetan chant in The Ascent of F6. And it is a perfect example of the kind of thing I must learn to accept. If I'm too dainty-stomached to swallow a little Sanskrit, how can I possibly prove to my friends that there is something more to this place than mere quaintness?

I think how they would laugh at Vishwananda, and at moments I really hate them all—everybody outside the Center—savagely: there they sit, sneering and yet doing nothing to find out what it's all about. But I'm really hating myself—for not being strong enough to convince them.

To live this synthesis of East and West is the most valuable kind of pioneer work I can imagine—never mind who approves or disapproves.

Last night, Swami told me: “One thing I can promise you. You will never regret having come here. Never.”

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On August 17, I began what I described to myself as “a few days' rest from the Center.” I had rented a room in a house which was opposite the Viertels' home in Santa Monica Canyon.

This wasn't by any means my first “rest.” On several occasions I had spent a few nights at Chris Wood's house in Laguna Beach, or at the houses of other friends. I had also often been invited out to lunches and evening meals. Swami made no objection to any of this, as long as I wasn't needed at the Center for a particular reason.

He can't have realized, of course, that Santa Monica was an area of special danger to me, because of the erotic magic of the nearby beach. On May 14, there is a reference in my diary to this magic and to the kind of pseudo-aesthetic lust it aroused in me:

Down to Santa Monica to have lunch with the Viertels, then went on the beach with Garbo and Tommy Viertel. We walked along the shore, right to the pier. The sun was brilliant, with a strong wind—the palms waving all along the cliff, and the ocean dazzling with light and foam. The air was full of spray and falling light; it was beautiful beyond all words. The afternoon had an edge of extra-keen, almost intolerable sensation on all its sights and sounds and smells. Seeing a human body in the far distance, you wanted to seize it in your arms and devour it—not for itself, but as a palpable fragment of the whole scene, of the wildness of the wind and foam, of the entire unseizable mystery and delight of the moment. I glimpsed something, for an instant, of the reality behind sex. Something which we reach out toward, as we take the human body in our arms. It is what we really want, and it eludes us in the very act of possession.

Garbo chattered away. She was nice. I liked her better than ever before. Later she drove me back, shooting all the stoplights. But the afternoon was more memorable than she was.

August 18. Strange—I've been looking forward to this outing for several weeks, and now that I'm here I find I'm bored. This is chiefly because of the Viertels. I'd blandly assumed that they'd be delighted to see me, and that they'd devote all their time to keeping me amused. They are quite pleased to see me, but they're all working hard and busy with their own problems.

Thus frustrated, I decided to get in touch with a young writer I had recently met, Tennessee Williams. He had come out to California to work on a picture for M-G-M. A friend had given him my address and he appeared at the Center—by ill luck, in the middle of a meditation period. But, despite the embarrassment of our surroundings, we had managed to exchange the necessary psychological signals, which meant that we would meet again.

I located Tennessee, after some search, at a very squalid rooming house called The Palisades, at the other end of town—sitting typing a film story in a yachting cap, amidst a litter of dirty coffee cups, crumpled bed linen, and old newspapers. He seemed not in the least surprised to see me. In fact, his manner was that of the meditative sage to whose humble cabin the world-weary wanderer finally returns. He took it, with discreetly concealed amusement, as the most natural thing in the world that I should be having myself a holiday from the monastery. We had supper together on the pier and I drank quite a lot of beer and talked sex the entire evening. Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he's tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can't stay awake.

Since the coastal area had been put under a wartime blackout, the park at the top of the cliffs had become a sex jungle at night, full of servicemen and their hunters. Tennessee was in his element there. I walked with him a little way into the thrilling darkness but didn't join him in the hunt.

During the next week, we were together often. We were quite charmed by each other and already intimate, like the old friends we were destined to become. Swimming with him, or taking long early rides alone up the coast on a bicycle, I was more than usually body-conscious and pleased with my vigor. My thirty-ninth birthday was only a few days ahead, but I didn't care. I felt like a young man.

One marvelous evening, Berthold read German poetry aloud to me, including mad Hölderlin, my favorite. We were both moved to tears. I realized that he was trying to re-create the role of mentor which he had played ten years earlier, while we were working on the film. In this role, he kept making indirect attacks on the monastic life. To these I didn't react. I could never be angry with him again—for, now that he had become a character in
Prater Violet,
he was a privileged creature and, in a sense, my child. He didn't know this yet.

By this time, Denny had been discharged from the forestry camp because of some cardiac weakness. On the twenty-first, he came to visit me in Santa Monica with two friends. One of these friends was a young man of striking beauty. Describing the scene later, I used to say that my first glimpse of him had hit me “like a shot from an elephant gun” and made me “grunt” with desire. When Denny and I were alone, I accused him of having maliciously introduced me to this beautiful temptation in order to seduce me away from the Vedanta Center. This was meant as a joke. Nevertheless, I knew that the young man's image had been stamped upon my mind and would reappear at inconvenient moments, in the shrine room and elsewhere. It would be all the more disturbing because I realized already that he himself wasn't unattainable.