Tendrel

by Harold Talbott

Tendrel tells the story of a gifted young man who grows up in a sophisticated Upper East Side household in New York in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s. He rubs elbows with many famous people growing up—Noël Coward, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Dwight Eisenhower, and others. After he’s dismissed from St. Paul’s School in his senior year, he frequents gay bars and discovers his sexuality. As an intellectually precocious teenager he finds himself drawn to Medieval studies, French literature, and Buddhism. While at Harvard he converts to Catholicism. After many twists and turns, traveling to France, Greece, and Italy, making friends and indulging in flings, he graduates. Two weeks later, his mother jumps to her death from a window of their upper Fifth Avenue apartment. Months later, the author suffers a nervous breakdown. His recovery brings him into contact with the renown piano duo, Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, and through them many of New York’s great artists, including Tanny and George Balanchine, Samuel Barber, Stella Adler, John Housman, and Cicely Tyson, all of whom are part of Tendril’s melody.

In 1967 his mentor, the Benedictine monk and theologian Dom Aelred Graham, invites the author to accompany him as his secretary on a year-long journey to Asia to meet with leaders from non-Christian religions. During that year the author is accepted as a private student by the Dalai Lama, who tells him, “I will…make you my monk in America.” In 1968 the author acts as Thomas Merton’s guide to Tibetan lamas in the Indian Himalayas; he puts up the great Cistercian monk in his small bungalow in Darjeeling. Merton confronts the author, telling him: “You’ve got to get it straight kid: what the Tibetan tradition has to offer us is dzogchen and that’s where it’s at…[So] if you want to know…find a dzogchen yogi.” Merton dies a month later in a Bangkok hotel. The author finds his Dzogchen yogi, Lama Gyurda-la, outside Darjeeling. He enters the path of Dzogchen and discovers his life’s work: understanding the nature of mind, of being liberated in the ups and downs of living.

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