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.
Thirteen
When I did finally move out of the Center, at the end of August 1945, it was for a reason which had nothing to do with the Vedanta Society. I had recently met a young man with whom I wanted to settle down and live in what I hoped could become a lasting relationship. His name was William Caskey. He had been born in Kentucky, of mixed Irish and Cherokee Indian ancestry. I always thought of him as being predominantly Irish, but that was perhaps because I found his Irish characteristics easier to recognize, having once lived in Ireland. Caskey himself felt that the Indian predominated.
What is much more important, in relation to this narrative, is that his mother’s family were all Irish Catholics and that two of his great-uncles, to whom he was very much devoted, were priests. So he had had a thorough Catholic upbringing throughout his early life.
Nevertheless, at the age of sixteen, he had decided to stop going to confession. His attitude could be stated as follows: I won’t go to confession because, if I do, I must tell the priest that I have had “carnal knowledge” of other men, and that I repent and resolve to sin no more. Which would be a lie. I have not repented and I have not resolved to sin no more; and the lie would be a much worse sin than the sex. These stinking hypocritical church people tell lies like that most of the time, when they confess. I believe in God a whole lot more than they do. Even the Church can’t stop me from believing in Him. I will always believe in Him.
Caskey’s faith, combined with his indifference to the fact that he was living in sin, seemed to give him a special kind of strength. I couldn’t altogether understand his attitude, not having had his upbringing, but I could sincerely respect it, and my respect reinforced the bond between us. We were both believers. On the rare occasions when we found ourselves inside a Catholic church—this was usually while we were sightseeing in some foreign country—it came naturally to us to kneel down together and pray.
I never discussed Vedanta with him, knowing that he must find its view of sin hopelessly unserious. Caskey could hardly have tried to bring me around to his way of thinking, since this would have meant persuading me that I, too, was living in sin. Anyhow, he rather belittled converts. If you hadn’t been born a Catholic, he said, you couldn’t know what it was all about. Faith was established in infancy.
Caskey met Swami a few times and relations between them were polite. Swami must have known intuitively that Caskey was firm in his own beliefs. Caskey never criticized Swami to me in any way. This didn’t mean, however, that either of us felt shy of making inter-creedal jokes. Once, when I had been to a puja, I brought back one of the cakes which the ladies of the congregation used to bake, to be offered to the Lord and later eaten at the lunch which followed. There was always an oversupply of these and I had been urged to take this one home with me. Next time we had a party, Caskey served the cake to our guests, telling them, with his satirical Southern drawl, “Do try some of this—it’s just delicious—Chris brought it from Heaven.”
My home life with Caskey was lively, noisy, drunken, sometimes full of laughter, sometimes quarrelsome, with head-on clashes of temperament. Caskey cooked well and loved to entertain. My own contribution to this was chiefly dishwashing—the only activity which linked me to my Quaker and Vedanta days. I couldn’t regard anything we were doing as evil. It could sometimes have been called shocking, but that was only in the language of others, whose business it wasn’t. I was simply glad to be living out in the open at last, with no appearances to be kept up and no need for pretenses.
Now and then, during hangovers, listening to Sinatra or some other spellbinder on the record player, I had moments of dull misery or a stabbing sense of alienation from what was present in the Hollywood shrine. But this pain was also perversely pleasurable, just because it was a genuine feeling. So often, when I was living up at the Center, I had been unable to feel anything at all.
* * *
Swami was always pleased to see me when I visited him. There were never any reproaches. I supposed he was biding his time, waiting for me to work off my bad karma, remaining certain that I was in the Lord’s hand and could come to no serious spiritual harm. Still, I was anxious to prove my continuing loyalty to him. So I volunteered to help him with another translation. This was Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination.
The Crest-Jewel presented a much less difficult problem than the Gita; no variations of prose and verse were required. All I had to do was render Swami’s already almost adequate English into a clear and suitable prose style, which could be used throughout the book.
At the beginning of the Crest-Jewel, Shankara states the case for the monastic life with brutal frankness:
Only through God’s grace may we obtain those three rarest advantages—human birth, the longing for liberation, and discipleship to an illumined teacher.
Nevertheless, there are those who somehow manage to obtain this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and an understanding of the scriptures—and yet are so deluded that they do not struggle for liberation. Such men are suicides. They clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves.
For what greater fool can there be than the man who has obtained this rare human birth together with bodily and mental strength and yet fails, through delusion, to realize his own highest good?
While I was working on such passages, it was easy to tell myself that I was unworthy of my task. Puritanism tempted the ego to assert itself in the role of Outcast Sinner, just when I should have been ignoring it completely and getting on with the job. This wasn’t a question of being worthy or unworthy but of having the necessary literary skill; I had it, so what was there to worry about? It is arguable that, in certain cases, a spiritual teacher may lose credibility because his way of life contradicts what he teaches. But here it was Shankara, the impeccable, who was doing the teaching; I was merely his scribe.
My progress through the Crest-Jewel was slow. I didn’t finish it until the end of 1946. It was published in 1947.
* * *
In January 1947, I took off by plane on my first postwar visit to England. I hadn’t seen my mother or my brother, Richard, in eight years. This trip was clearly necessary and could be justified to everybody, including Swami, as a family duty. However, when it was over, I didn’t return to California. Caskey was waiting for me in New York, where we had decided to try living for a while. It wasn’t long before New York had convinced us both that it wasn’t for us. But, meanwhile, I had had an offer from my publishers to write a travel book for them about South America. This appealed to us as an adventure and also because it would give Caskey a chance to practice his profession, photography. Our journey began in September 1947 and continued throughout the following winter and spring. From Buenos Aires we sailed for France, stayed a week in Paris, and then crossed to England.
While in Paris in April 1948, we saw Denny Fouts for the first time in about two years. My meeting with him is described in Down There on a Visit more or less as it actually took place, except that Caskey had to be left out because he wasn’t a character in the novel. Denny was then smoking opium whenever he could afford to. When he couldn’t, he had to content himself with a kind of tea brewed from the dross out of his opium pipe; from this he got small pleasure and violent stomach cramps. He didn’t give us the impression of being depressed or debauched or down-at-heel, however. He was dressed with extreme elegance when he came to have dinner with us at a restaurant—or rather, to watch us eat. He did so with an air of controlled dista
ste, as though our addiction to solid food were a far more squalid vice than his. Now and then, his manner became a trifle vague, but his wit was as sharp as ever.
There is one memory which I want to recall here, although it is also recorded in Down There on a Visit. Arriving at Denny’s apartment one day, we were introduced to some young French friends of his. They began what sounded like a parody of Frenchified intellectual conversation. One of them made a sneering reference to those dupes who believe in a life after death. What I can still hear as I write this is the withering tone in which Denny silenced him, exclaiming, “You little fool!” Denny’s scorn was quite uncannily impressive. It was as if he knew.
He died that same year on December 16, almost instantly, of a heart attack, in Rome.
* * *
I saw Swami shortly after my return to Los Angeles in July 1948, but we didn’t meet often during the rest of that year. I was busy at M-G-M, helping write a film based on Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. Also, I had started writing The Condor and the Cows, the book which describes our South American journey.
During the fall, Swami added to my work load with a project of his own—to translate and write a commentary on the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali. Although they are usually called aphorisms in the English translations, their Sanskrit name sutras is more descriptive, because sutra means, literally, “thread.” Composed in a period when there were no books, these terse sentences were designed to be easily memorized; they form only the bare connective thread of a philosophical exposition. Here are Patanjali’s first four sutras:
This is the beginning of instruction in yoga.
Yoga is the control of thought waves in the mind.
Then man abides in his real nature.