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One of the pleasures in reading Christopher Isherwood is the ease with which he writes in the first person. He creates an atmosphere of intimacy where one is privy to all kinds of internal and external dialogs. The reader becomes complicit in a constant barometric recording of success and failure. Unfolding narratives explicate on topics ranging from sexual aspiration, neurotic deliberations, spiritual sleuthing or (most satisfying) his own grappling with the writing process.
Here is an excerpt from My Guru and His Disciple where he shares an aha! moment, a discovery that allows him to move forward with the translation of the Bhagavad Gita text. What starts out as a pedantic laborious effort at transcription turns into poetry.
And then—it was really amazing—I saw in a flash what to do. I ran back to my room with the manuscript.
Our version began: “Oh, changeless Krishna, drive my chariot between the two armies which are eager for battle, that I may see those whom I shall have to fight in this coming war. I wish to see the men who have assembled here, taking the side of the enemy in order to please the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra.”
In about half an hour, I had turned this into:
Krishna the changeless,
Halt my chariot
There where the warriors,
Bold for battle,
Face their foeman.
Between the armies
There let me see them,
The men I must fight with,
Gathered together
Now at the bidding
Of him their leader,
Blind Dhritarashtra’s
Evil offspring:
Such are my foes
In the war that is coming.
I brought this back and showed it to them, and they were both excited. I’m excited myself, because it opens up all sorts of possibilities, and I now realize how horribly bored I was with the old translation. I don’t see my way clearly yet, but obviously this method can be applied throughout the book. There should be several different kinds of verse, and I think I can vary the prose style too. We are going to Aldous this evening, to discuss the whole thing with him. — Christopher Isherwood, October 1943
