My Guru & His Disciple (10 page)

No doubt there had always been some friction between them. Denny could be sharp-edged, sour, and rude, and he was chronically suspicious of the motives of others. (In
Down There on a Visit,
I have presented the Denny–Paul character as a kind of touchstone which reveals whatever elements of falseness are present within the people who are exposed to it.) Denny couldn't resist challenging Gerald's authority as a teacher and mocking his old-maidish fastidiousness, his affectations of speech, his evasiveness, his Irish blarney. Gerald, who was extremely sensitive to any hint of criticism, began to withdraw, injured. Soon Denny—and therefore I—had stopped seeing him unless it was absolutely necessary. I can't pretend that I had tried very hard to prevent this from happening. I realized that it would be far easier to live with Denny if I kept him to myself as much as possible.

*   *   *

Through the Huxleys, we heard of a lady who taught hatha-yoga exercises. We wanted to learn these for purely athletic reasons, so we were glad to find that she didn't set herself up as a spiritual guru, like some other hatha-yoga practitioners. The exercises did make us feel wonderfully healthy. They also filled up most of the time we had free from other occupations.

Our teacher, though perhaps a lot older than she looked, was the embodiment of suppleness and serpentine charm. A serpent who was also a perfect lady, she never lost her social poise. Having explained that the air which is passed through the body in the air-swallowing exercise should come out “quite odorless,” she merely smiled in playful reproach when we discharged vile-smelling farts.

I felt that I ought to tell the Swami about our lessons—guessing that he might not altogether approve of them. The violence of his disapproval surprised me. He didn't object to the postures and the stretching but he warned me sternly not to practice those breathing exercises which require you to hold your breath; they can cause hallucinations, he said, and end by damaging the brain. In 1935, when he made a return visit to India with Sister Lalita, he had met one of his former fellow monks who had since left the monastery and taken up hatha-yoga. This ex-monk was the same age as Prabhavananda and therefore already in his forties, but he looked like a boy of eighteen and behaved like a half-witted child, giggling meaninglessly. The usual justification for the practice of hatha-yoga is that it strengthens the body in preparation for spiritual austerities. But Prabhavananda seemed to regard it merely as an indulgence of physical vanity. “What is the matter with you, Mr. Isherwood?” he asked me reproachfully. “Surely you do not want Etarnal Youth?” I was silent and hung my head—because, of course, I did.

When I questioned our teacher—as tactfully as I could and without mentioning Prabhavananda—about the possible dangers of the breathing exercises, she laughed at the idea but then conceded that if you practiced them rigorously, for many hours each day throughout a number of years, you could perhaps do yourself harm. So I was left in a state of indecision, not wanting to disobey Prabhavananda yet not feeling that I need give up our lessons altogether.

Then, however, our teacher began to urge us to learn the yoga technique of washing out the intestines by muscular action alone; you squat in a bowl full of water, suck the water in through the anus, swirl it around inside you, expel it again, thus cleansing yourself of poisons. Until this technique has been mastered, you should use an enema every day. And meanwhile, the sphincter muscle of the anus must be made more flexible, through dilation … A set of rectal dilators now appeared. I use that verb advisedly because I can neither remember nor imagine our serpent lady actually giving us such unladylike objects. Did Denny perhaps procure them? The largest was a wicked-looking dildo, quite beyond my capacity but dangerously tempting to my curiosity. I told Denny that, at least as far as I was concerned, our lessons would have to stop—lest sex should sneak in through the back door. We parted from our teacher but continued to do some of the exercises at home. (Years later I took to using the breathing exercises occasionally, because I found them helpful in clearing up obstinate hangovers.)

*   *   *

On July 7, my monastic experiment with Denny was cut short by the opening of the La Verne Seminar. This seminar had been planned by some leading Pennsylvania Quakers in correspondence with Gerald. La Verne is about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. In those days, it was a very small town in the midst of orange and lemon groves, with a coeducational college founded by one of the Baptist sects. Since this would be vacation time, the Quakers had been able to rent the girls' dormitory building to house the twenty-five men and women who were going to take part in the seminar.

It had been agreed that there were to be three periods of group meditation and two periods of group discussion, daily. These were some of the problems scheduled to be discussed:

To what extent must the beginner in the spiritual life be prepared to discipline himself? Can we make a distinction between the duties and privileges of two ways of life—that of the householder and that of the monk? Is the life of prayer a form of escapism, or is it, perhaps, the most direct form of action? Can the other major world religions, taken together with the findings of modern science, help us revise our cosmology? Granted that the present order of things is in a state of chaos due to the war, what could be the structure and sanctions of a new order of society? Can we produce an order in which man's spiritual growth is fostered, not hindered? What have history and science to teach us about the nature and power of non-violence?

Gerald, I knew, was coming to La Verne with one personal objective; he wanted to find out how far he could go in agreement with the Quakers. In his writings, he had referred to the Society of Friends as the most promising force for spiritual regeneration within the Christian Church. But he had described the Quaker way of meditation as happy-go-lucky. Quakers sit passively waiting for the Inner Light, he said, without bothering to study what the great mystics have taught about the technique of prayer. Gerald had also deplored the Quaker preoccupation with social-service projects. The Quaker social worker, he said, is unwilling to face the truth that his activity is chiefly symbolic; its material consequences for the people he is trying to help can't possibly be foreseen and may sometimes be disastrous. The only person who stands to benefit spiritually from the project is the social worker himself—as long as he can remember that he isn't really helping his fellow men but offering an act of worship to the God within them. The worker nearly always forgets this, Gerald added, because he becomes distracted by anxieties about the material success of his project.

As for the Quakers themselves, many of them were broad-minded and genuinely humble. I think they were fascinated by Gerald's personality and eager to understand his ideas, but they couldn't help being suspicious of what they called his “Oriental” tendencies. And even the most liberal of them must have regarded his celibacy with some distaste. Quakerdom is based on the values of family life.

*   *   *

Until shortly before the seminar opened, I had been supposing that I should attend it on my own, since Denny would already have been called to his camp. But the call-up never came and now there was no reason why he shouldn't join me. This he did unwillingly and with a bad grace, bringing his hostility to Gerald along with him. As soon as we arrived at La Verne, Denny began watching me for signs of disloyalty to himself—that is, of friendliness toward Gerald. So now I found myself in a peculiarly false position. I felt obliged to cooperate with Gerald publicly and also to join Denny in bitching him behind his back.

Indeed, we bitched nearly everybody at the seminar. Our negative behavior expressed the discomfort we felt at being separated from our previous life together. We decided that life at La Verne was a kind of parody of it and that these professionally religious people were hypocrites, posers, windbags. From our decision, a convenient conclusion could be drawn: if they weren't acting up to their professed principles, then we needn't act up to ours.

Actually, Gerald was at his brilliant best throughout the month we spent at La Verne. As unofficial chairman, he was tact itself in checking the overtalkative and encouraging the shy to speak. And he was masterly in his summings-up of rambling speeches which nobody else had been able to follow.

*   *   *

In my diary there is a day-to-day account of the seminar, with descriptions of all those who took part in it. I have already borrowed some of this material for the seminar scenes in
Down There on a Visit,
setting them in a different location and inventing a sex scandal to involve the Denny–Paul character. What remains I may publish elsewhere. It doesn't belong to the main theme of this book.

If the La Verne Seminar had been a sporting event—Contemplatives versus Actives—it could be said to have resulted in a draw, one all. By the time it was over, my cousin Felix Greene had decided to give up his executive job with the Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia and remain in California with Gerald. And I had decided to go to Philadelphia and work with the Quakers.

This didn't mean that I had changed sides, philosophically speaking. My motives were practical. Feeling convinced that the States would soon be at war and that I should then have to declare myself a conscientious objector before a draft board, I wanted to get involved with an organized pacifist group which could give me the moral support I would need. I couldn't with honest conviction join any of them except the Quakers. Other such groups tended to be dominated by Christian fundamentalists who upheld the infallibility of the Bible and similar dogmas which I didn't accept.

I might, of course, have found employment with the Quakers of Los Angeles, some of whom I already knew. But it seemed to me less embarrassing to make my plunge into Quakerdom as a stranger among strangers, 2,394 miles distant from Gerald's possibly reproachful gaze.

*   *   *

On August 21, having at last got his call, Denny left for the forestry camp at San Dimas, not far from La Verne, but up in the mountains. The next day, I flew East to visit Wystan and to be interviewed by Caroline Norment, who was about to open a hostel for refugees from Nazi Europe under the auspices of the Friends Service Committee. Caroline and I took to each other and it was agreed that I should report for work as one of her assistants, in the middle of October.

*   *   *

The hostel was at Haverford, just outside Philadelphia. A large, shabby mansion, built at the beginning of the century and once luxurious, was its headquarters. Between twenty-five and thirty refugees—men, women, and children, Jews and non-Jews—were living there or at the homes of neighboring Quakers. Many of them had professional backgrounds—as teachers, lawyers, economists, musicians—and could hope to get jobs sooner or later. When they did so, they would be replaced at the hostel by other refugees who were on a waiting list.

Meanwhile, the function of the hostel was to prepare them for an independent existence in the United States. Some needed to rest and get their health back, some needed to learn more English. But their psychological preparation was a greater and subtler problem. Uprooted, disillusioned, and suspicious, they were being asked to have faith in and adapt themselves to an abstraction called the American Way of Life, which even their mentors couldn't quite agree with each other in defining. No doubt, the indoctrination was sometimes less than tactful. No doubt, the indoctrinees were sometimes bossed into activities they didn't see the point of. Nevertheless, while admitting the validity of Gerald's objections to the Quaker practice of social service, I felt that we—Caroline and her assistants—were doing considerably more good than harm.

My days were spent giving the refugees English lessons, going for walks with them, accompanying them to classes at Haverford College—to learn the American Way of Teaching—and to social gatherings in the neighborhood—to observe the American Way of Entertaining. I also, like everybody else at the hostel, lent a hand with the housecleaning and washed dozens and dozens of dishes.

The thought that I was serving God within the refugees came to me often, not awe-inspiringly, but comically. It sustained me as a private joke does, so long as you don't tell it to anyone else. The essence of this joke was that most of these human temples of the God I was serving would have unhesitatingly described themselves as atheists.

I am sure that the refugees had many jokes about me and the rest of the hostel staff. Almost without exception, they saw the Quakers as lovable but unworldly eccentrics and Quaker pacifism as mere craziness. From their point of view, my best asset was probably that I had known pre-Hitler Berlin. They kept coaxing me to talk about it. Doing so made me slip naturally into German, in which they would join me—thus breaking our often-broken hostel rule that English must be spoken whenever possible. Even those who spoke it fluently seemed unwilling to, unless compelled. Perhaps because the language reminded them of their predicament as aliens.

What they didn't realize was the extent to which I, too, was an alien, in Quakerdom. But, unlike them, I wanted to belong to it. Already I was using Quakerese in conversation with my fellow workers: “Caroline, I have a concern.” “Caroline, does thee want me to take thy letters to the mail?” I attended the Haverford Meeting House on Sundays and within a few weeks found myself standing up and speaking. Playacting? Yes, partly. But playacting about something that was entirely serious to me. There is no reason why you can't equate the Quaker Inner Light with the Hindu Atman. I was really talking about Vedanta to them, but in their idiom, not mine. It was merely my self-consciousness which made this into a theatrical performance.

*   *   *

At the end of those long long workdays, I was usually eager to drop into bed and sleep. But, later on, when I had discovered a sexual playmate, I would take an occasional evening off with him in Philadelphia. This seemed to me just fun, well earned. I had no conscience pangs. I had never felt that Quakerdom demanded celibacy of me; they all approved of sex, even if it was only of the lawful kind. I made one little concession to respectability, however; I always removed my Friends Service Committee button from my jacket before we went into bars where we would get drunk and the steam bath where we sobered up again.