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The
following is from Jeffery Paine's wonderful Father
India: Westerners Under the Spell of an Ancient Culture:
Isherwood
is a good study for students of twentieth-century
religion. He ranted against "sin-obsessed,
life-denying" Protestantism but using easy,
ready-made formulas, as though not his own but his
generation's biases were speaking through him. When he
damned it to hell, he merely repeated the objections to
religion as his era defined religion. And what exactly
were those definitions of and objections to religion? Like
some, Isherwood protested the idea of God, a Boss in
heaven, which then made him a junior employee in a firm
doing questionable business. Like Marx, he denounced the
social uses religion served, allowing the exploiters to
have a good conscience and the exploited to acquiesce in
their bad lot. Like D. H. Lawrence, he faulted the
religious prohibitions against wholesome desires. But
Isherwood's chief complaint was that religion required you
to believe in far-fetched dogmas unrelated to experience.
Isherwood never bothered to wonder if all religion was
like his caricature of it or whether a faith without sin,
dogmas, or even God might be possible. When Isherwood
disembarked in New York that cold winter's morning [in
193?], had anyone then suggested that in America he would
acquire an Indian guru and become a religious devotee,
surely he would have laughed: he was a novelist, and not
even he wrote fiction that implausible.
The
critic Edmund Wilson once proposed an experiment. Wilson
observed that religious words like God had been
worn down to near meaninglessness and so proposed
obliterating them and seeing what actual experience
discovered under their pentimento. Isherwood's life in the
New World came close to enacting Wilson's experiment, as
a mind that had already dispensed with God got backed into
a cul-de-sac from which a spiritual practice was one of
the few ways out. Isherwood needed support in a world
going up in flames; he required some justification for his
embryonic pacifist feelings to counter the pervasive,
patriotic war rhetoric. By chance he met a Hindu monk in
Los Angeles who refuted most of Isherwood's stereotypes
(all negative) of what religion was and supplied him a
different vocabulary of faith that a sensual modern like
himself could speak. Surprised as he was to have gotten
involved with swamis and India, Isherwood tentatively
began a spiritual life - one that the fierce preachers and
fiery proselytizers of old would not have approved or even
recognized - but a spiritual life nonetheless. In regard
to religion, Isherwood felt like the awkward guest who
arrives during the last hour of a party, knowing no one
else there or what's gone on before. Only little by little
did he realize he had arrived not during the last but
nearer to the first hour, that he was in fact
participating in one of the larger religious
reinterpretations in history. Something unprecedented was
being given birth to, and he was, so to speak, part of the
labor pains.
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Christopher Isherwood is a multifaceted
character. Our interest focuses on his work as a contributor to
the Vedanta literary heritage. We offer the following by way of
background and hope to add to the biographical and critical
information presented. 
