Track of the Grail

LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT (374 pp.)--Vincent Sheean--Random House ($3.75).

Vincent Sheean, veteran foreign correspondent, sat in Vermont in the summer of 1947 and pored over Marx, Freud and Einstein with the earnestness of a junior getting up a term paper. His purpose, says Sheean, was to arrive at a formula that would explain away the appearance of God or destiny that had forced itself on his attention in human affairs. After "very bitter suffering," he arrived at this: "The concatenation of the circumstances sometimes, or even quite often, becomes snarled in a way which produces indications of pattern in the incidence of the occurrences."

For readers of Sheean's previous works of self-revelation (Personal History, Not Peace But a Sword, etc.), such metaphysical posturing will seem familiar. No reporter was ever less contented with bare facts or more portentously absorbed in getting at the groundswell-meaning of things for himself than "Jimmy" Sheean. His 1947 "formula" did not satisfy him long. Lead, Kindly Light is the story of a new conviction that came to take its place: the conviction of an immanent and transcendent God who cannot be explained away. The man who gave him his conviction: India's late great Mahatma Gandhi.

The Gift of God. During the summer and fall of 1947 a sort of premonition of Gandhi's martyrdom had oppressed Sheean; he spoke of it to friends and editors and finally persuaded Editor Ted Patrick of Holiday to send him to India. In New Delhi, he hung around with other American reporters during the days of Gandhi's last fast, then went to see him.

The last of two evening interviews with Gandhi ended only two days before Gandhi's assassination. Sheean has made a painful effort to report everything that was said. He is conscious of the incongruity of the meeting: the tall red-faced

American with big feet and a hole in his sock squatting on the floor and putting boyish questions to the tiny, tired Mahatma.

Reporter Sheean asked him how it was that a righteous war, the war against Hitler, could produce such disastrous results, and Gandhi answered simply that if violent means were used the result was always bad. Sheean asked him if the physical world was illusion and Gandhi told him that that was an incorrect translation of the word Maya; he agreed that it meant "appearances," and added in a whisper: "God is in everything. Even in the stone. Even in the stone."

Sheean came to a crucial religious question, whether certainty of God preceded renunciation of the world. Gandhi answered at once, "No, the renunciation precedes the certainty." Then he quoted to Sheean the first verse of the Isha Upanishad: "The whole world is the garment of the Lord. Renounce it, then, and receive it back as the gift of God."

The Dark Explosions. On the day of the assassination, Sheean stood in the garden, saw Gandhi come across the grass toward the summer house, saw him climb the steps, and heard "four small, dull, dark explosions." Sheean nearly fainted, fell against the garden wall, and after some minutes realized that his eyes were scalding with tears--"more acid than I had known"--and that blisters had suddenly appeared on the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. "How could such things be?" he asked himself.

Sheean drew on his Western knowledge: he decided the blisters were psychosomatic. For months he had had fantasies of interposing himself between Gandhi and his assassin; he concluded the blisters were the result of his failure to "die for the Mahatma." He was equally sure that, in a larger sense, what had happened to him was supernatural. He set about the serious study of Hinduism and of the life of Gandhi. In Lead, Kindly Light (the name of one of Gandhi's favorite Christian hymns) he treats both at length, with a gravity that is new to his writing.

Some Christians may be ready to observe that Vincent Sheean could have found his insight closer to home and that his whole story is a supreme example of a foreign correspondent's insensibility to all but the foreign, even in religious revelation. To Vincent Sheean, who feels he is at last on the track of his own elusive grail, the point will probably be immaterial.

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