Mr Isherwood Changes Trains

Victor Marsh

Description

British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) moved to America prior to the Second World War and lived more than half his life in California, writing for the Hollywood studios. Famous initially for the stories he wrote during the rise of the Nazis, he attracted a second wave of interest in the 1970s with his 'out' autobiography 'Christopher and His Kind' (1976). But much less is known about Isherwood's writing during his forty years as a student of a guru from the Ramakrishna Order.



In Mr Isherwood Changes Trains, Victor Marsh interrogates the assumptions and prejudices that have combined to disparage the sincerity of Isherwood's religious life. Marsh elucidates those features of Vedanta philosophy that enabled Isherwood to integrate the various aspects of his dharma: his vocation as a writer, and a spirituality not predicated on the repudiation of his sexuality. Marsh details the heartfelt search for a 'home-self' that found expression in later works such as 'My Guru and his disciple' and in what is seen as Isherwood's finest novel, 'A single man' (1964).

Informations

• Publié par: Clouds of Magellan
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781742980690
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reviews
‘Christopher Isherwood sustained a long project of spiritual self-fashioning, a fact often overlooked, or even denigrated, by his many biographers, critics and reviewers. In this original reappraisal, Dr Marsh makes a convincing case for the centrality of the spiritual in Isherwood’s life. In addition, his interrogation of the contingencies that have accumulated to separate homosexuality from spirituality strikes me as being of more general and profound importance. … written with admirable lucidity.’

Professor Stephen Muecke, School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales


‘Dr Marsh gives the most nuanced reading of Christopher Isherwood and his principled self-disclosure that I have read, astutely placing the meaning of Isherwood’s sexuality in relation to seeking and living a spiritual life. The historicizing and critical review of Isherwood is excellent and contributes an important and necessary corrective to much of the literary misunderstandings and ignorance that has been extant about Isherwood. The author gives expert and original readings into Isherwood’s life narratives, discovering valuable connections that provide insights into core metaphysical concerns about the nature of the self (where homosexuality can be read as a crucial means of spiritual wholeness).
This book is an important and relevant addition to the field of sexuality studies and the nascent area of the convergence between Eastern and Western approaches to homosexuality and spirituality. Dr Marsh makes an eloquent and rigorous case to reclaim the validity, coherence and necessity of a spiritual life not predicated on the denial of one’s sexuality, but rather on its celebration and significance.’

Associate Professor Baden Offord, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University; Co-Director, Centre for Peace and Social Justice
MR ISHERWOOD CHANGES TRAINS
Christopher Isherwood and the search for the ‘home self’
VICTOR MARSH

Clouds of Magellan | Melbourne
(c) 2010 Victor Marsh
First published 2010
Clouds of Magellan
www.cloudsofmagellan.net
Melbourne, Australia
All rights reserved
ISBN: 9780980712056 (p/b)
ISBN: 9781742980690 (ebk)

A Cataloguing-in-Publication for this title is available from the National Library of Australia
Images used with kind permission of the artist, Don Bachardy:
Colour portrait of Christopher Isherwood on his 76th birthday, 26 August 1980.
Acrylic on paper. Don Bachardy.
Portrait of Christopher Isherwood, 17 November 1968.
Pencil and ink wash drawing. Don Bachardy.


Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
Conversion by Winking Billy
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustration ~ Christopher Isherwood by Don Bachardy
1
Introduction
2
Reclamations
Reframing the possibilities of the religious life
3
Dis-locations
Isherwood’s search for the ‘home self’
4
Re-locations
Isherwood comes ‘home’
5
The rascal and the saint
6
Changing trains
Liberation and the ‘disobedient’ subject
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
In the long evolution of this work, I have several people to thank for their encouragement. I must acknowledge my gratitude for the close critical reading given the text at various stages by Amanda Lohrey and Ruth Blair, Stephen Muecke and Baden Offord. The faults remain entirely my own. Thanks go to the School of English, Media Studies and Art History and the University of Queensland, which made it possible for me to research this project under a UQ Postgraduate Research Scholarship
I must also thank Gordon Thompson, my gracious publisher at Clouds of Magellan, for taking on a difficult book, and Helen Bell for her meticulous editing.
In Los Angeles, I am indebted to the following people: to Dan Luckenbill of the UCLA library for his suggestions for further reading, his personal reminiscences of Christopher Isherwood, and introducing me to Don Bachardy. To Don Bachardy, for the portrait art included in this volume, for his insights and feedback, and for kindly submitting to a lengthy interview. To Romaine Ahlstrom and the staff of Reader Services at the Huntington Library in San Marino and especially to Sue Hodson, the curator of the Isherwood collection, who gave me access to important papers, lecture notes, and correspondence. To Nirvana—Bob Adjemian—Publisher of the Vedanta Press, Pravrajika Vrajaprana, and other members of the Ramakrishna Order of Southern California, for helping me understand Isherwood’s relationship with the Society and with Swami Prabhavananda.
Elements of the discussion have been canvassed previously in Life Writing , Ariel , Theology & Sexuality , White Crane , and Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds.
1 - Introduction
The critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
—Michel Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’
This book comes out of research undertaken for a doctorate. When people would ask me, ‘In what field?’ my response—’spiritual autobiographies by queer men’—would produce a range of surprised reactions: from outright astonishment bordering on disbelief, to (from the more subtle) a wry smile. In any case, the next question would be, ‘You mean … there ARE such things?’ with the not always vocalised subtext, ‘There can’t be very many!’ and I was supposed to join in the joke. Of all the things that queer men are about, it couldn’t be religion, or ‘spirituality’, the assumption goes. Queer = gay = homosexual = they’re all about sex; religion and sexuality have always been mutually exclusive— homo sexuality is officially labeled as an abomination by the churches. Ergo, these represent two mutually exclusive possibilities for being and knowing.
In my early research I was fascinated, then, to find a cache of autobiographical writing by queer men who, in spite of the common misconception that an authentic religious life could only be pursued if based upon a repudiation of their ‘deviant’ sexuality, had engaged sincerely with various forms of religious belief and practice. This rich corpus of texts, narrating spiritual journeys both within and without mainstream religious groups, gives voice to experience otherwise discursively silenced by the conventional religious narratives that dominate public perceptions, narratives that privilege normative constructions of identity. As they concern themselves with an area of human spirituality usually ignored by mainstream commentary, these writings have proved worthy of close attention.
Among this group, the British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived more than half of his life in southern California, stands out as being of exemplary interest. Isherwood was born in Cheshire, England, in 1904. He was the son of an army officer who was killed near Ypres, in the First World War. Isherwood knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer and, frustrating his mother’s wishes for him to be a don, he dropped out of Cambridge. Adding to his mother’s disappointment, he studied medicine only briefly before moving to Berlin on the recommendation of his close friend, the poet WH Auden, whom he had known since prep. school. On the eve of the Second World War, with the memory of his father’s death still with him, he and Auden migrated to the United States, declaring themselves to be pacifists. Isherwood died in Los Angeles in 1986.
There have been calls for Isherwood to be re-evaluated as a serious religious writer (Wade 2001), yet the proposal has met with a certain amount of scepticism, as I will show, for this possibility does not square with the standard view of Isherwood, which is dominated by a set of stereotyped views that pays little attention and even less respect to his religious life.
In what follows I provide a reading of Isherwood’s life and work based not so much on the early writing—dating from his time in Berlin during the 1930s—nor from the ‘out’ gay autobiographical texts of the 1970s, but from the neglected religious writings of the intervening years that culminated in the modest classic My Guru and his disciple , his last major book, which was published in 1980 just a few years before his death. This element of the life and work recommends him as being of exceptional interest into the twenty-first century, yet it has been given scant attention by the literary commentariat until very recently (the rare exceptions coming among the collection of essays edited by James Berg and Chris Freeman in 2004 — The Isherwood century — and a rather muddled attempt from Antony Copley, in his book A spiritual Bloomsbury , 2006).
I will analyse factors contributing to the entrenched scepticism around the allegedly irreconcilable ways of being and knowing—’queer’ and ‘religious’—to challenge the limitations that are commonly thought to apply in the domain of queer men’s spiritual lives. The analysis raises issues to do with the social and political construction of knowledge, and it is within this wider context that I will offer my reading of Isherwood’s contribution to contemporary thought. While postmodern interrogations of gender have destabilised conventional notions of masculinity, and feminists have challenged the patriarchal constructions of religion, queer men are presumed to have abandoned the field of spirituality and religion altogether, to focus solely on civil rights. The struggle for equal rights before the law is unquestionably important, yet too often it rests on the untested assumption that queer folk have no inter