My Interview with Christopher Isherwood from August 1980

An Interview with Christopher Isherwood

My Guru and His Disciple

By RICH SEELEY

HOLLYWOOD – If it is true that opposites attract, outside the world of physics, then Christopher Isherwood’s friendship for Swami Prabhavananda is an example of the drawing power of polarity.

On the one side we have Isherwood, an English novelist transplanted in Hollywood in the ‘30s where he enjoyed a gay Hollywood lifestyle.

On the other side we have Swami Prabhavananda, a monk from India with a deep resentment toward English imperialism, who was transplanted in Hollywood to run the Hindu Vedanta Center where he practiced celibacy as part of the road to spiritual enlightenment.

It must have been a friendship made in heaven because it seems there was no way on earth that it could have worked.

It did work. The Swami was Isherwood’s friend and spiritual mentor from the day they met in 1939 until the Swami died in 1976 at the age of 80.

Isherwood celebrates their friendship in “My Guru and His Disciple” (Farrar-Straus-Giroux, New York), the second in his cycle of autobiographical books which began in 1976 with “Christopher and His Kind.”

There is a strong sense of worldliness emanating from Isherwood, a small man with a soft spoken voice that carries just a hint of an English accent his years in Hollywood have failed to erase. He seemed very resigned and disillusioned as he talked about his life during a recent interview at the Hollywood Brown Derby. “I’m not at all sure that I believe in reincarnation,” he said. “It’s quite a toll going through one long life. There is no more virtue to long life than there is to a long marriage. Both can be hell.”

Sharp and in relatively good health at 75, he said long life is “pretty much depends on the parents you choose.”

Asked if he thought it was extraordinary that an openly gay author could become friends with a celibate Hindu – he says, “A misunderstanding has arisen about that. It is no different than say I got to be friends with a Catholic priest. They wink at things like that. Most religions do.”

Here is a man of few illusions. A man who has been disillusioned and now has the quality that you get from that. One recalls a passage in “My Guru” where Isherwood is talking about the mythical King of Death in the Katha Upanishad: “Outwardly, he is a figure of majesty and terror; inwardly he is disillusioned and therefore wise.”

There is a link between the two poles. The spiritually wise guru and the world-wise writer had one thing in common.

In “My Guru,” Isherwood explained the link in a story about Ramakrishna, one of the spiritual leaders of Vedanta.

“Ramakrishna had been known to get out of a carriage to dance with drunkards on the street. The sight of their reeling inspired him because it made him think of the way a holy man reels in ecstasy. He danced with his friend G. C. Ghosh, a famous dramatist and actor, when Ghosh was drunk, and encouraged him to go on drinking. Ghosh took advantage of Ramakrishna’s permissiveness and visited him at all hours of the night, sometimes on the way home from a whorehouse.

“Ghosh became a kind of patron saint for me….”

Isherwood said that while Swami believed that sex led to worldly attachment and blocked the road to spiritual peace – “He was not a puritan. He had no use for puritans.”

If Isherwood was an unlikely seeker after the spiritual life, his Guru never pretended to be Simon Pure. Prabhavananda, for all his opposition to drugs, was a chain-smoker who enjoyed a nip of sherry in the evening. He was criticized by some for his smoking and he sometimes sipped sherry on the sly.

Isherwood defends this saying: “Swami wasn’t being hypocritical when he refrained from drinking in the presence of those who would have been shocked by it; he simply tolerated their prejudice, which he anyhow found unimportant.”

After reading “My Guru,” one gets the feeling that the reason the friendship worked so well is that both men may have admired the opposite in the other. Isherwood admired the saintly acceptance of his Swami and the holy man in turn may have been more than a little fascinated by the worldly life enjoyed by his famous disciple.

The other thing that worked for them is that they had the wisdom to be accepting of each other.

In the early ‘40s, Isherwood tried to become a monk and live at the Hollywood Vedanta Center. But try as he would, the monastic life wouldn’t take and he would find himself drifting away to the sensual pleasures of Santa Monica.

He would come back to the center shame-faced and Swami would say, “Chris even if you eat dirt I won’t reject you.”

Isherwood could accept the Swami’s way because the Swami accepted Isherwood’s lifestyle.

When asked if it wasn’t wonderful to find a spiritual mentor who could be that understanding, Isherwood said, “Yes, it was. And how wonderful for him to be able to be that accepting. It’s wonderful to be in a state of mind where you can truly accept the way someone is.”

That is the other side of acceptance, which the Western mind might see as an invitation to be trampled over. There is strength in acceptance and Isherwood became fascinated with that in his Guru.

“It was entirely Swami’s personality that attracted me,” Isherwood said. “There were Vedanta societies in London and New York when I was there and I never had any involvement with them.

“One felt about Swami that he was a vessel that this extraordinary thing passed through. He wasn’t charismatic. Some people met him and were not impressed with him in the least. But when he had this thing we all felt it. It was a kind of authority that he had about him and great peace.

“Over the years that I knew him it was like seeing somebody develop into a major genius. Yet, it was illusive like genius.”

It is the mystery of a worldly observer watching his friend climb to the highest spiritual peak that infuses “My Guru” with power.

As the Swami continues to make his way up while Isherwood watches, a love develops between the two men that makes platonic seem like a weak term or perhaps one that needs redefinition.

On Feb 21, 1957, Isherwood notes in his diary: “It’s as if he were exposing me to stronger and stronger waves of his love – yet, all the while, making almost no personal demands on me.”

In his diary for March 2, 1961, Isherwood notes that he had turned down an invitation to come to the Hollywood center for dinner. Then he writes: “A bit later, Swami called me and said, ‘I’m lonely for you, Chris.’ It wasn’t that he was nagging at me to come. He just felt like saying this, so he picked up the phone and said it. There are no strings attached to his love, therefore it is never embarrassed. The ordinary so-called lover is out to get something from his beloved, therefore he is afraid of going too far and becoming tiresome.”

At the end of “My Guru,” Isherwood indicates that he is not sure what kind of book he has written.

What he has written is a kind of love story that no major author has attempted since Somerset Maugham wrote “The Razor’s Edge.” And if he was trying to get beyond any other book that sits on the high shelf, he has got it.

from The Orange County Register, Aug. 10, 1980

1290 words