My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood Page A

he isn’t really helping his fellow men but offering an act of worship to the God within them. The worker nearly always forgets this, Gerald added, because he becomes distracted by anxieties about the material success of his project.
    As for the Quakers themselves, many of them were broad-minded and genuinely humble. I think they were fascinated by Gerald’s personality and eager to understand his ideas, but they couldn’t help being suspicious of what they called his “Oriental” tendencies. And even the most liberal of them must have regarded his celibacy with some distaste. Quakerdom is based on the values of family life.
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    Until shortly before the seminar opened, I had been supposing that I should attend it on my own, since Denny would already have been called to his camp. But the call-up never came and now there was no reason why he shouldn’t join me. This he did unwillingly and with a bad grace, bringing his hostility to Gerald along with him. As soon as we arrived at La Verne, Denny began watching me for signs of disloyalty to himself—that is, of friendliness toward Gerald. So now I found myself in a peculiarly false position. I felt obliged to cooperate with Gerald publicly and also to join Denny in bitching him behind his back.
    Indeed, we bitched nearly everybody at the seminar. Our negative behavior expressed the discomfort we felt at being separated from our previous life together. We decided that life at La Verne was a kind of parody of it and that these professionally religious people were hypocrites, posers, windbags. From our decision, a convenient conclusion could be drawn: if they weren’t acting up to their professed principles, then we needn’t act up to ours.
    Actually, Gerald was at his brilliant best throughout the month we spent at La Verne. As unofficial chairman, he was tact itself in checking the overtalkative and encouraging the shy to speak. And he was masterly in his summings-up of rambling speeches which nobody else had been able to follow.
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    In my diary there is a day-to-day account of the seminar, with descriptions of all those who took part in it. I have already borrowed some of this material for the seminar scenes in Down There on a Visit, setting them in a different location and inventing a sex scandal to involve the Denny–Paul character. What remains I may publish elsewhere. It doesn’t belong to the main theme of this book.
    If the La Verne Seminar had been a sporting event—Contemplatives versus Actives—it could be said to have resulted in a draw, one all. By the time it was over, my cousin Felix Greene had decided to give up his executive job with the Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia and remain in California with Gerald. And I had decided to go to Philadelphia and work with the Quakers.
    This didn’t mean that I had changed sides, philosophically speaking. My motives were practical. Feeling convinced that the States would soon be at war and that I should then have to declare myself a conscientious objector before a draft board, I wanted to get involved with an organized pacifist group which could give me the moral support I would need. I couldn’t with honest conviction join any of them except the Quakers. Other such groups tended to be dominated by Christian fundamentalists who upheld the infallibility of the Bible and similar dogmas which I didn’t accept.
    I might, of course, have found employment with the Quakers of Los Angeles, some of whom I already knew. But it seemed to me less embarrassing to make my plunge into Quakerdom as a stranger among strangers, 2,394 miles distant from Gerald’s possibly reproachful gaze.
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    On August 21, having at last got his call, Denny left for the forestry camp at San Dimas, not far from La Verne, but up in the mountains. The next day, I flew East to visit Wystan and to be interviewed by