My Guru and His Disciple

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW

In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A rambling, agreeable diary-cum-commentary of Isherwood's long (1939-76) connection with Swami Prabhavananda. The ""disciple""--who looms much larger in the book than the guru--cuts a contradictory figure as a devotee. He starts out from an admittedly simpleminded Marxist atheism (God the ""symbol of the capitalist superboss""), but ends in an equally uncritical pious Hinduism. (At Charles Laughton's deathbed, he prays to Ramakrishna and urges Laughton to pray to ""God"": ""Do it for Brahmananda's sake, for Vivekananda's sake, for Prabhavananda's sake."") On the other hand, Isherwood has next to no theology. His religion is simply the hints and glimpses he gets of transcendence from observing the swami's spiritual life. (And yet, he claims, this is not a personality cult.) Isherwood, despite his passionate, eager homosexuality, champions his celibate guru, and spends more than a year as an aspirant monk. (Shortly before this, he and his current lover get into the habit of afternoon car trips, with the non-driver reading aloud from some religious work to keep the driver's mind off ""sexy pedestrians."") Typically Isherwood makes no excuses for these and other follies and inconsistencies--any more than he paints halos around the head of his guru. In these scattered, impromptu sketches we see Prabhavananda as a messy (belching, hawking up phelgm), imperfect (politically chauvinist, jealous of ""competition"" from other swamis), and therefore highly believable saint: a humble, loving, selfless, transparent human being. What difference he made in his disciple's life--beyond a purely personal intimacy--is hard to say. In his conclusion Isherwood regrets that he can't assure his fellow mortals that ""all is ultimately well."" Prabhavananda might say this with ""the absolute authority of a knower,"" but he can't. No cosmic panoramas, then, just a handful of casual, but convincing and artfully drawn portraits. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.