The chief characters in the 1946 film, The Razor'southward Border
This article was beginning published in The Mountain Path, 1988, pp. 239-45.
In January 1938 Somerset Maugham, the British novelist, visited Sri Ramanashram for a few hours. The brief contact he had with Bhagavan inspired Maugham and then much, he decided to use him as the model for a fictional Guru in The Razor'south Edge, a novel of his that was published a few years afterwards in 1944. Maugham too wrote a non-fiction account of his visit in an essay entitled 'The Saint', which was published twenty years after the issue in 1958. The post-obit account, which is taken from this essay, records Maugham's impressions of this meeting with Bhagavan.
In the course of my journey to India I went to Madras and there met some people who seemed interested to know what I had been doing in India. I told them virtually the holy men who had suffered me to visit them, and they immediately proposed to take me to see a Swami who was the near celebrated and the almost revered and so in India. They called him the Maharshi.
Somerset Maugham
I did non hesitate to autumn in with the suggestion and, a few days later, early on 1 morning, nosotros set out. Later a dull hot drive along a dusty, bumpy road, dusty because the heavy wheels of ox-drawn wagons had left deep ruts in it, we reached the ashram. We were told that the Maharshi would run into us in a fiddling while. We had brought a basket of fruit to nowadays to him, equally I was informed that it was the graceful custom, and sabbatum downwardly to the picnic luncheon we had been sensible plenty to put in the machine. Suddenly, I fainted dead away. I was carried into a hut and laid on a pallet bed. I exercise not know how long I remained unconscious just soon I recovered. I felt, however, too ill to motility. The Maharshi was told what had happened, and that I was not well enough to come into the hall in which he normally sabbatum, and so, later some time, followed by two or three disciples, he came into the hut into which I had been taken.
What follows is what I wrote in my notebook on my return to Madras. The Maharshi was of average height for an Indian, of a nighttime honey color with shut-cropped white hair and a close-cropped white bristles. He was plump rather than stout. Though he wore zip but an exiguous loincloth he looked peachy, very make clean and almost dapper. He had a slight limp, and he walked slowly, leant on a stick. His mouth was somewhat large, with thickish lips and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. He bore himself with naturalness and at the same fourth dimension with nobility. His mien was cheerful smiling, polite; he did not requite the impression of a scholar, only rather of a sweet-natured erstwhile peasant. He uttered a few words of cordial greeting and sat on the ground non far from the pallet on which I lay.
Subsequently the get-go few minutes during which his eyes with a gentle benignity rested on my face, he ceased to look at me, but, with a sidelong stare of peculiar fixity, gazed, as it were, over my shoulder. His body was admittedly still, but now and and so one of his feet tapped lightly on the earthen floor. He remained thus, motionless, for peradventure a quarter of an hour; and they told me later that he was concentrating in meditation upon me. Then he came to, if I may so put it, and again looked at me. He asked me if I wished to say annihilation to him, or ask whatever question. I was feeling weak and ill and said so; whereupon he smiled and said, 'Silence is as well conversation'. He turned his head away slightly and resumed his concentrated meditation, once more looking, every bit information technology were, over my shoulder. No ane said a word; the other persons in the hut, standing by the door, kept their optics riveted upon him. Later on another quarter of an hour, he got upward bowed, smiled farewell, and slowly, leaning on his stick, followed by his disciples, he limped out of the hut.
I do non know whether it was the event of the remainder or of the Swami's meditation, merely I certainly felt much better and in a piddling while I was well enough to become into the hall where he sat past twenty-four hours and slept at night. It was a long, bare room, fifty feet long, information technology seemed to me, and about half every bit broad. There were windows all around it, but the overhanging roof dimmed the lite. The Swami sabbatum on a depression dais, on which was a tiger skin, and in front of him was a minor brazier in which incense burnt. Now and again a disciple stepped forwards and lit some other stick. The scent was amusing to the nostrils. The faithful, inhabitants of the ashram or habitual visitors, sat cross-legged on the floor. Some read, others meditated. Soon, ii strangers, Hindus, came in with a basket of fruit, prostrated themselves and presented their offerings. The Swami accepted it with a slight inclination of the head and motioned to a disciple to take it away. He spoke to the strangers and and then, with another inclination of the head, signified to them that they were to withdraw. They prostrated themselves once more and went to sit among the other devotees. The Swami entered that beatific state of meditation on the space which is chosen Samadhi. A little shiver seemed to pass through those present. The silence was intense and impressive. You felt that something foreign was taking place that fabricated you inclined to concord your breath. After a while I tiptoed out of the hall.
After I heard that my fainting had given ascension to fantastic rumours. The news of it was carried throughout India. It was ascribed to the awe that overcame me at the prospect of going into the presence of the holy man. Some said that his influence, acting upon me before I even saw him, had caused me to be rapt for a while in the space. When Hindus asked about it, I was content to smiling and shrug my shoulders. In point of fact that was neither the beginning nor the final time that I have fainted. Doctors tell me that information technology is owing to an irritability of the solar plexus which pressed my diaphragm against my heart.
…Since then, nonetheless, Indians come to come across me at present and then as the man who by the special grace of the Maharshi was rapt in the infinite, equally his neighbours went to see Herman Melville as the man who had lived among cannibals. I explain to them that this bad habit of mine is merely a physical idiosyncrasy of no result, except that it is a nuisance to other people; but they milkshake their caput incredulously. How do I know, they ask me, that I was not rapt in the infinite? To that I do not know the answer, and the just matter I can say, but refrain from maxim for fear it will offend them, is that if information technology was, the infinite is an accented blank. The idea of theirs is not then bizarre as at start glance it seems when one remembers their belief that in deep, dreamless slumber consciousness remains and the soul is then united with the infinite reality which is Brahman…
The involvement angry past this incident, unimportant to me, merely significant to Maharshi's devotees, has caused them to send me a mass of cloth concerned with him, lives, accounts of his daily activities, chat with him, answers to the questions put to him, expositions of his teachings and what not. I have read a neat deal of it. From it I accept formed a bright impression of the extraordinary man he was..(The Saint, pp. 2-5, published by Heinemann, 1958)
Major Chadwick has written about this visit on pages 37-40 of his memoir A Sadhu'south Reminiscences. His business relationship of Maugham's brief darshan is essentially the same. Even so, he criticised Maugham for inventing a trip to the former hall that never took place:
Major Chadwick
After [giving darshan to Maugham in my room] Bhagavan returned to the hall [while] the rest of the political party remained in my room for tea. After tea, Somerset Maugham, who was wearing a big pair of boots, wanted to become to the hall and see where Bhagavan usually lived. I took him to the western window through which he looked for some time with interest, making mental notes. He says in his indifferent and quite uninspired commodity The Saint, published in a series of essays twenty years after the event, that he sat in the hall in Bhagavan's presence, just this is untrue, considering he could not enter with his boots; he only gazed into the hall from outside. He has also tacked a certain amount of philosophy onto Bhagavan which Bhagavan would never have uttered in his life. Merely such is the habit of famous authors, to put their own opinions in the mouths of others.
In his contempo manufactures Somerset Maugham says that because of his fainting fit, which some Indians regarded as a high land of samadhi, which he denies, he has been sent a mass of literature concerning Maharshi. This may exist true, but it is certainly true that he wrote to the ashram and told them that he was going to write about Bhagavan and asked for equally much material every bit they could send. He pointed out at the time that, of course, if he wrote annihilation it would be a wonderful advertisement for the ashram and the Maharshi. Every bit if it were needed!
At that place is i other cursory account of Maugham's visit in Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, talk no. 550. That version concludes by saying: 'The author [Maugham] attempted to ask questions but did not speak. Major Chadwick encouraged him to ask. Sri Bhagavan said, 'All finished. Heart talk is all talk. All talk must terminate in silence only.'
Annamalai Swami and Major Chadwick
This account was written by Annamalai Swami on the day that the darshan took place. When I spoke to Annamalai Swami recently [1988] about this meeting he told me that he, Bhagavan, Chadwick and Maugham were sitting in silence for about half an hour in the room. He besides told me that Bhagavan's remarks were uttered in English, rather than Tamil, because there was no interpreter at that place at the fourth dimension.
Maugham left India about two months afterward and returned to his habitation in the South of France. In 1940, afterward Frg invaded and conquered France, he went to America and lived at that place for the residuum of the war. He settled in S Carolina where he completed the writing of The Razor'south Edge, the novel in which the fictional Bhagavan appeared.
The hero of the book, Larry Darrel, is a young American drifter who wanders around the world in an attempt to find peace of mind and answers to some of the central questions that have traditionally perplexed spiritual seekers. He comes to India and finds what he is looking for in a South Indian ashram that is presided over by a Guru who is clearly Bhagavan masquerading nether a different name. Afterwards staying several years at the ashram, a contented Larry Darrel returns to America at the end of the book with the aim of living, then far every bit information technology is possible in the West, the life of a sadhu.
There has been considerable speculation amid Maugham scholars equally to whether the life and grapheme of Darrel is derived from a real-life devotee of Bhagavan. The question appeared to be settled a few months agone when Wilmon Menard, an American writer who has written a play based on Maugham'southward life, wrote an article that was published in the May-June [1988] result of Namaskar, the in-flight magazine of Air Republic of india. Menard stated in the article that he had spoken at length to Maugham about the writing of The Razor's Border. In an interview that he gave in the Due south of France, Maugham manifestly told him that he had met an American devotee called Guy Hague at Sri Ramanasramam and had immediately decided to utilize him as a model for the main graphic symbol in his next book. A friend of mine sent a copy of this article to a Mr Dennis Wills, an American researcher who had previously written to Sri Ramanashram asking for information about Hague'southward stay there and Maugham's brief visit to Bhagavan. I also wrote to Mr Wills since I had nerveless a few facts about Maugham and Hague that I thought would be of interest to him.
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