My Guru and His Disciple

My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood''s spiritual instructor Swami Prabhavananda the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood''s own life. Sexual sprees all-night drinking bouts a fast car ride with Greta Garbo scriptwriting conferences at MGM intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives My Guru and His Disciple has been written.