Mr Isherwood Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood and the search for the 'home self'

British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) lived more than half his life in California, writing for the Hollywood studios. Famous initially for the stories he wrote about his time in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, he attracted a second wave of interest in the 1970s with his 'out' biography Christopher and His Kind. But much less is known about Christopher Isherwood's writing during his forty years as a student of guru from the Ramakrishna Order. In Mr Isherwood Changes Trains, Victor Marsh confronts the assumptions and prejudices that have combined to disparge 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 based on the repudiation of his sexuality. Marsh details the life search for a 'home self' that found expression in later works such as My Guru and His Disciple and in what it is seen as Isherwood's finest novel, A Single Man.