My Guru & His Disciple (5 page)

I am nearly certain that Prabhavananda, by the time I met him, harbored no prejudice against the British as individuals. Indeed, I often suspected that he felt more akin to us than to the Americans among whom he had now lived for fifteen years. An enemy, present or past, is more intimately related to you than a neutral can ever be.

Besides, we shared a cultural background with him. Abanindra's British tyrants had forced him to attend schools modeled on the British educational system, to learn to speak British English, not American, and to study literature and philosophy which was almost exclusively British. (Abanindra had found the philosophy unsubtle and materialistic but had acquired a lasting fondness for Shakespeare.)

And now Abanindra, transformed into Prabhavananda, was actually playing teacher to two highly distinguished representatives of the tyrant race. Here were Huxley and Heard coming to him as pupils, humbly intent on learning the philosophy of
his
race, which their ancestors had conquered and then presumed to teach. What a victory! No, I am not being flippant. And I don't mean that Prabhavananda was enjoying the situation spitefully. That he should have such pupils gave him genuine pride, and his pride was tempered with humility. He was constantly aware of the many things which the two of them could have taught him. He had a Hindu reverence for knowledge as such, even though much of their knowledge was of a sort which his monastic training made him regard as spiritually worthless. He really valued his association with them and continued to value it in later years when he saw them only seldom.

But were Heard and Huxley fully his pupils, even at the beginning? Were they indeed accepting his philosophy as a whole, without reservations? No, I don't think they were. Both of them were eclectics—continually on the lookout for fresh formulations of ideas, new items of information which they could fit into their complex individual world pictures. Neither one of them could have put himself unreservedly under the direction of a single teacher.

And then there was the question of age. It certainly wasn't unheard-of for a swami to have disciples who were older than himself. But the Hindu concept of the relationship does have a father-child aspect; and both Huxley and Heard may well have found this embarrassing. Gerald was four years older than Prabhavananda, Aldous was less than a year younger. Yet both of them could have belonged to a senior generation, not because they looked so old but because of their air of maturity and assurance. Prabhavananda, though nearly forty-six, was still aware of his boyish appearance; it sometimes made him feel unsure of himself, as he was the first to admit.

I, on the other hand, was eleven years Prabhavananda's junior, as boyish-looking as he, and even less sure of myself. Many of the psychological props which had hitherto supported me had been knocked away. I now needed a new kind of support, and I urgently hoped to be able to accept him as my first and only religious teacher, my
guru.

He was considerably shorter than I was. This made me able to love him in a special, protective way, as I loved little Annie Avis, my childhood nanny, and as I should love Stravinsky. His smallness sometimes seemed baby-like, because it was combined with an animal lack of self-consciousness about his physical functions. He belched loudly without excusing himself. He also expelled the mucus from his sinuses with harsh snorting noises which embarrassed the fastidious. (In later life, he stopped doing this—probably because his sinuses cleared after he gave up smoking.)

As a youth he must have had a lithe, athletic body which I would no doubt have found sexually attractive. He was still slim and carried himself erect. I was aware of a strong sexuality in him which seemed to be controlled, rather than repressed or concealed. He would remark, quite often and without embarrassment, that some girl or woman was beautiful. His honest recognition of the power of sex attraction and his lack of prudery in speaking of it was a constant corrective to my inherited puritanism.

The breadth and smoothness of his forehead gave him a calm, truthful look. His nostrils were very wide; I wondered if this was the result of the deep inhalations and exhalations which he recommended as a method of quieting the mind before meditation. His lips were big and expressive, without any suggestion of austere restraint; when they parted a little, the two extra-large front teeth peeped out, comically rabbitlike. His skin was golden but not dark. When he wore his monastic robes—of which the yellow color symbolizes renunciation—the effect was striking; he seemed all gold. But that was only when he gave lectures in the temple. Otherwise, he nearly always wore informal Western clothes: a white shirt with or without a tie, a woolen pullover, gray flannel slacks, and leather slippers.

Oriental eyes are often somewhat dismissively described as beautiful. Prabhavananda's eyes, if you considered them simply as features, were not remarkably so. They didn't dazzle or dominate you at first glance. They were soft, dark, and moist, with yellowish whites. Therefore, whenever I describe their effect upon me, the reader must remember that I am really describing how Prabhavananda—or “this thing”—was using them on that particular occasion.

His voice was naturally soft. But when he lectured, he spoke loudly and clearly, without effort. His English was fluent, with some quaint pronunciations which delighted me. He said “fussht” for “first,” “etarnal” for “eternal,” “okezzshionally” for “occasionally,” “whir-relied” for “whirled,” “Mr. Hard” for “Mr. Heard.”

*   *   *

“This house belongs to Maharaj. Maharaj is watching over it, over all of you. I can do nothing on my own. I am only his servant.” This was what Prabhavananda would tell me, and everybody else who came to the Center, again and again.

Such statements embarrassed me a little at first. I reacted to them with a nervous smile. But I was aware that Prabhavananda didn't make them lightly; that they didn't merely express a conventional piety, as in the phrase: “This is God's house.”

You could say that his belief in the presence and protection of Brahmananda was all the religion he needed. It was through Brahmananda that he felt himself in communication with “this thing.” Actually, during his monastic life in India, he had met most of Ramakrishna's direct disciples and had spent much more time with some of them than he had spent with Brahmananda himself. Knowing these disciples must have confirmed Prabhavananda's faith. He spoke of them with the deepest reverence. But Brahmananda was his guru, and remained unique.

Could I pretend to understand what such a devotion must mean? No. My own experience of relationships was so different and so inferior. I couldn't help thinking of any sort of love relation as a bargain struck between two parties. The parties might keep to it for a short or a long while or even until death, but they could never regard it as absolutely firm. Neither one of the parties could be trusted not to violate it at any moment without warning—thus enabling the other party to impose penalties or employ the blackmail of forgiveness.

Prabhavananda explained that Brahmananda didn't love others in this person-to-person way. Having realized God, who is love, he had
become
love. Those who came into his presence felt that love; he gave forth love while remaining incapable of possessiveness or jealousy.

I could understand this statement as an intellectual proposition; emotionally, it was unintelligible to me. And I had difficulty in relating it to Brahmananda's behavior during that brief, extraordinary scene of Abanindra's decision to join the monastery. Brahmananda's answer, “When the Lord wills,” seemed disconcertingly passive, almost indifferent—even though it was accompanied by a look of “unforgettable sweetness.” Was this because Brahmananda was already aware that Abanindra had subconsciously made up his mind to become a monk?

And, beyond this mystery, there was an even greater one: What had both Brahmananda and Holy Mother meant by asking, “Haven't I seen you before?” Must one suppose that they had been associated with Abanindra in a previous life? And did that mean that Abanindra was already a member of their inner circle and that his becoming a monk in this life was therefore inevitable? I decided not to try to make sense out of any of this for the present. I put it into what Gerald aptly called “my suspense account.”

When Prabhavananda insisted that he himself wasn't really running the Center, the image which occurred to me in trying to understand this situation was that of a party of rock climbers, roped together. The highest climber we could see was Prabhavananda. But, above him, up there out of sight, was Brahmananda, the actual leader of the party. Brahmananda had already reached the summit, the goal of the climb. Therefore he must have seen to it that the top end of the rope was firmly belayed. The climbers could all follow him to the summit, provided that they didn't lose their determination to go on climbing. Even if they slipped and fell, it could only be for a short distance. The rope would break their fall and hold them while they found a new toehold on the cliff face.

It was very important to me that Prabhavananda described himself as a servant; that made me feel closer to him. It meant that I needn't expect him to be perfect and try to explain away his weaknesses. From this standpoint, his major addiction, chain-smoking, seemed sympathetic, even reassuring. The humility expressed by his attitude to Brahmananda must surely protect him from spiritual pride. Instead of claiming the greatness of a spiritual teacher, he was showing us an example of a great disciple—which was what we most needed, being disciples ourselves.

Nevertheless, the basic question remained: Was Brahmananda indeed up there, and was there contact between him and Prabhavananda? Perhaps the day would come when I should be able to get a direct answer to this, through meditation. All I could hope for at present was some kind of half answer obtained indirectly through Prabhavananda, by studying his words and actions and trying to get a glimpse of what was behind them.

My only tool for Prabhavananda study was my own intuition. It certainly wasn't infallible. It had made mistakes in the past, especially when I had demanded quick judgments; it functioned slowly. Still, it was all I had and better than nothing. It already assured me that Prabhavananda wasn't in the least crazy and wasn't in any sense a charlatan. But, for all his sanity, honesty, and intelligence, he could still be a wishful thinker, sincerely self-deceived. Would it ever be possible for me to feel certain about this, one way or the other?

Four

What I have just written is misleading in one respect; it suggests that my relationship with Prabhavananda was now established and continuous. Well, in a sense, it was. I thought about him many times every day, taking it for granted that he would be available whenever I needed him. But the astonishing fact remains that, during the rest of the year and the spring and summer of 1940, I very seldom went to see him.

I will try to explain why.

*   *   *

Sometime in July 1939, Berthold Viertel, the poet and film director, had returned home from England via New York. I had first met him in 1933 in London, where we had worked together on the script of a film he was to direct (see
Christopher and His Kind
). We had become close friends.

Berthold, his wife, Salka, and their three sons had a house near the beach in Santa Monica Canyon. Though Berthold and Salka were both Jews from Central Europe, they couldn't exactly be called refugees, since they had settled in the United States several years before Hitler came into power. Both had worked for the Hollywood studios, Salka as an actress as well as a writer.

Berthold had now been commissioned to direct a film and wanted me to help him with the script. It was to be about a young German officer who becomes a Nazi and is later disillusioned; quite ordinary stuff for those days, but when Berthold began to improvise on it, it sounded thrilling—what stuff didn't? I agreed eagerly, although he warned me that there would be very little money in it for either of us—the producer was of the kind called “independent,” a more ominous word then than now. (Indeed, the film was never made and ended in a lawsuit—which I had to settle out of my own pocket.)

Since 1933, refugees from Hitler's Reich had been arriving in Los Angeles. Salka, because of her connections at the studios and elsewhere, was able to find many of them work, especially the writers, actors, and musicians. Her home had become one of their favorite meeting places.

I myself belonged to this refugee world by adoption, having lived in it during my wanderings through various European countries, between 1933 and 1938. In those days, I had known a lot of its inhabitants, some intimately, and had been accepted by them almost as one of themselves, all the more so because I was traveling with an anti-Nazi German, Heinz. As far as an outsider could, I empathized with their self-mocking, witty despair and nearly sane paranoia.

These people were already dwelling in a future, a wartime, which very few native Californians could even imagine. To myself, as a European, the war atmosphere which the refugees breathed was more native than the ignorant peacefulness of the California air. They drew me into their midst by an overwhelming psychological suction. While I was with them, I actually worried less, because I felt that they were all sharing my worry with me. I took to spending more and more time in their depressing yet comforting company and became reluctant to leave it.

In September, a week or two after the outbreak of war in Europe, Vernon and I moved from the house we had been renting in Hollywood, into furnished rooms. These rooms were in Santa Monica Canyon, only a short walk from the Viertels but a long drive from where Chris Wood and Gerald Heard lived, and an even longer drive from the Vedanta Center.

*   *   *

Early in 1940, I got a job at M-G-M. This was chiefly thanks to the Viertels, who knew a producer there, Gottfried Reinhardt, one of Max Reinhardt's sons. We were to make a film out of James Hilton's novel
Rage in Heaven.
My fellow screenwriter was Robert Thoeren, an Austrian. So I remained within the refugee world even at the studio. Gottfried, Robert, and I often spoke German together when we were discussing the script.