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This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s search for the spiritual through his American writings. In his “Afterword” to his 1963 pamphlet An Approach to Vedanta, Isherwood describes the long road that brought him to Vedanta and explains that the contact with Swami Prabhavananda was above all a relationship through which he looked for a “still center” in life and art. Religious discourse plays an important role in Isherwood’s writings. Initially through Vedantic daily religious chores and rituals, and then thanks to Vedantic thought, Isherwood changes his way of reading the world and himself, which had been the main themes of his narrative. He approached Vedanta through Gerald Heard’s suggestion of meditation and yoga. Meeting Swami Prabhavananda in August 1939 was the beginning of the search of psychological and spiritual balance he subsequently appears to have found.

This chapter examines how selfhood drove Christopher Isherwood’s writing and his personal journey into Vedanta philosophy and practice with his guru, Swami Prabhavananda. Whether his writings were nominally fictional or autobiographical, Isherwood was constantly probing, reflecting, and reinventing versions of selfhood. Even the ostensibly fictional books would be recounted by a namesake narrator. Critics unsympathetic to his quest sometimes take this self-referentialism as a form of egotism, and a superficial reading of the autobiographical approach often conflates this technique with narcissism. The role of the guru within the bhakti (devotional) expression of yoga is commonly misunderstood outside of the Vedanta traditions. This chapter also considers Isherwood’s failure to connect to the sacred through Anglicanism, his respect and admiration for the Swami, and how meditation came to represent an unexpectedly complete solution to Isherwood’s struggle to locate an integrative subjectivity.

This chapter explores Christopher Isherwood’s prejudice against India. Isherwood’s deep-seated prejudice toward India dates from at least the 1930s. In his short story “The Landauers,” published in the spring of 1938 in New Writing, Isherwood’s racism is evident in the character of Bernhard Landauer. His Indophobia persisted all his life. The question arises as to why Isherwood was so prejudiced against Indians. In order to attempt an answer to that question, it may be helpful to look at the life and interests of the person whom he admittedly most hated while he was growing up: his mother Kathleen Isherwood. But once Swami Prabhavananda, his Vedanta guru, entered his life, Isherwood recognized that his negative feelings toward India were a problem and he engaged with it as best he could.