My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood Read Free Book Online Page A

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