Christopher Isherwood’s decision to emigrate to America in January 1939 was controversial, given that a war with Hitler in Europe now seemed inevitable. His chief reason for not wanting to fight was that his former partner, Heinz Neddermeyer, would be fighting in the German army. He was also tired of dutifully espousing the communist line in his work (he had recently completed the last of three anti-fascist plays with the poet W.H. Auden) and felt that pacifism was more congenial. After all, he reflected, he’d been a pacifist in all but name ever since his father, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, had died in World War I, and he’d despised the jingoistic herd mentality that was mandatory in wartime.
Isherwood decided to reconnect with his friend Gerald Heard–a polymath who wrote forbidding books with portentous titles, such as Pain, Sex and Time (1939)–which attempted to synthesize science, religion, anthropology, and psychology. Heard was also a committed pacifist who had come to America with the celebrated writer Aldous Huxley a few years earlier. Both Huxley and Heard were fascinated by Eastern spirituality, and after settling in Los Angeles, they met with Swami Prabhavananda, the head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Heard’s pacifism went hand in hand with the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Advaita means ‘non-dual,’ and Advaitins believe that the universe and everything in it is an emanation of the Hindu godhead brahman. The upshot of this monistic worldview is that everything is divine–humans, stones, plastic bags, peanut butter–whereas in dualistic religions such as Christianity there is a rigid distinction between the divine soul and the sinful body. Heard explained that the world we see around us, of apparent difference and duality (self and other, mind and body, East and West), was an illusion (maya). The aim of meditation was to transcend the illusory ego or self, and to realize that the true self (atman) is in fact the same as brahman–or, put differently, that atman is brahman in human form. To realize this divine self, Heard had systematically set about eradicating the buttresses of the ego: addictions, aversions, material possessions, and pride.
Isherwood rejected Christianity as a boy, partly because of the war-mongering attitude of the Anglican clergymen during World War I, who imagined that God was on the side of the British. He was more receptive to Vedanta philosophy and found the Sanskrit vocabulary more palatable than the Christian terms he associated with sanctimonious chapel services at school. Nonetheless, he was apprehensive about his first meeting with Swami Prabhavananda. Despite being a decade older than Isherwood (who was 34 at the time), Prabhavananda struck him as disarmingly boyish. After listening to the swami’s meditation instructions, he sheepishly asked whether the spiritual life was compatible with ‘having a sexual relationship with a young man’: had the Swami answered, as he half expected, that homosexuality was a sin, he would have walked away, but instead Prabhavananda replied: “You must try to see him as the young Lord Krishna.” In other words, Prabhavananda was urging Isherwood to see brahman in his new American boyfriend. For Advaitins, sex (whether queer or heterosexual) was not a sin in the Christian sense, but if one aspired to enlightenment like Heard (which meant liberation from samsara, the relentless cycle of rebirth), chastity was a necessity. Heard was now celibate as sex was a form of attachment that anchored one to the world of maya (ego, duality, difference).
The takeaway for Isherwood was that the body was divine rather than sinful and disgusting. He began to meditate and visited the Hollywood Vedanta Center at Ivar Avenue to hear Prabhavananda speak. When World War II broke out the following month, his burgeoning interest in Vedanta philosophy reinforced his pacifist position. If there was no self and other, no nation and enemy state–since everything was ultimately brahman–there was no reason for war. Unfortunately, most of humankind was in thrall in maya, and regarded themselves as separate from other people, disconnected to nature, siloed in an identity–American, queer, straight, male, female–that alienated them from others. Hence the slings and arrows of self-assertion, and that brutal act of state assertion: war. Advaitins like Prabhavananda, though, were non-binary, not in terms of gender, but on the level of reality.
Despite his pacifist convictions, Isherwood felt acutely guilty for shunning the war and making a handsome living as a Hollywood screenwriter. In October 1941, he volunteered to work at a Quaker hostel for refugees in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, he applied for work as a conscientious objector at a Civilian Public Service camp in Santa Barbara; after waiting in vain for his induction notice, he decided to undertake monastic training at the Hollywood Vedanta Center. In addition to his spiritual training–which consisted of long mediation periods in the morning and evening and repeating his Sanskrit mantra at least 2,500 times in front of the shrine–Isherwood was tasked with helping Prabhavananda translate the Bhagavad Gita into English. The Gita is one of the seminal texts of Hinduism and relates the discourse between the Pandava warrior Arjuna and Sri Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu who has taken human form as Arjuna’s charioteer). Arjuna is about to go to war with the Kaurava army but is dismayed when he perceives his teachers and relatives in their ranks. Believing it is morally wrong to slay his kinsmen, Arjuna lays down his arms. Krishna explains that while the body can be killed, the atman is immortal:
Not wounded by weapons,
Not burned by fire,
Not dried by the wind,
Not wetted by water:
Such is the Atman.
Just as the atman of Arjuna will be untouched by the death of his body, so will the atman of his kinsmen, therefore, Krishna tells him, he should not mourn their death. Furthermore, as a warrior it is Arjuna’s dharma (spiritual duty or divine law) to fight. Krishna explains that he can avoid the spiritual demerit that redounds on killing kinsmen by practising non-attachment. “To unite the heart with Brahman and then to act,” Krishna proclaims, “that is the secret of non-attached work. In the calm of self-surrender, the seers renounce the fruits of their actions and so reach enlightenment.” It is through desire and attachment to worldly things–power, possessions, sex and so on–which are transient and ultimately ‘unreal’, that people fail to apprehend ‘the Real’ (i.e., brahman).
In his daily life at the Vedanta Center, though, Isherwood often fell short of this philosophical certitude. It was the body and sex that was real, while, for all his hours of meditation, brahman remained unreal. As a prospective monk, he was expected to be celibate, and over time he found this injunction untenable. He finally quit the Vedanta Center in August 1945, a week after Japan surrendered, effectively ending World War II. In many ways, his monastic training and his translation of the Gita had been his war work. Moreover, he recognized that his dharma was to be a writer rather than a monk.
Jake Poller teaches in the English department at Queen Mary University of London. His latest book is a critical biography of Christopher Isherwood, published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality (Brill, 2019) and a biography of Aldous Huxley (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
