Advaita Vedanta and the Repositioning of Subjectivity in the Life-writing of Christopher Isherwood, "Homosexualist"

Abstract

For British critics, Christopher Isherwood went off the literary radar when he declared himself a pacifist and de-camped to California on the eve of WWII. Nothing he wrote after the Berlin Stories (1939), when his life was barely half over, until Christopher and his Kind, in 1976, when he emerged as a kind of gay literary icon, was accorded much serious attention from Britain's literary establishment. Furthermore, what he published during his long relationship with a guru in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition—which culminated in the classic My Guru and his Disciple (1980)—has scarcely been taken seriously, and only a few of the more astute literary critics have detected the influence of Vedanta philosophy in his later work (e.g. Nagarajan, 1972). Yet there have been calls for Isherwood to be re-evaluated as a serious religious writer (Wade, 2001).

If such calls are to be taken seriously there are several issues that need to be addressed, not the least of which would be the dominant cultural expectations surrounding the (im)possibility of a spirituality not predicated on the denial of sexuality. "My personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him," he wrote in 1970 (Bucknell, 2000: ix).

There is also the problem of an unreconstructed colonialist prejudice towards religious practices associated with a subject people. Here, I review important aspects of the non-dualist philosophy of his Advaita training that allowed Isherwood to integrate his sexuality and his writing with his religious practice.

Isherwood was inclined less to approach ideas as abstract principles and more as they were embodied in particular people. With this particular Swami, an exponent of the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition, Isherwood found his lifelong guide, and the narrative of his spiritual journey is the history of a relationship that deepened over 40 years. That relationship is the other focus of this article.